A Pilgrim’s Digression

The holiday is over and all my good intentions of writing more frequent blog entries this holiday season have passed on with it.  I don’t know what I would have written anyway.  It was a more uneventful Christmas than most, for reasons I don’t quite understand.

We skipped the family Christmas party this year, and apparently many others did as well.  My Grandma told me that not many people were there, which I suppose is a sad thing except that I really don’t enjoy it much.  My Dad skipped it this year, too.  My step-mother was sick, he said, and so they were staying home.  I can’t be judgmental about whether this was true or not.

Still, I felt some lingering guilt when I saw my Grandma for the first time since July.  I saw her December 23, and the first thing she did was hug me and say, “Well, I made it to Christmas.”  She was crying as she added, “I missed you so much.”

Her cancer is not spreading, but it is not exactly in remission, either.  The chemo is at best just prolonging her life, which I suppose is all one can hope for.  She looks the same.  She acts the same.  Her eyesight has deteriorated to the point that she is legally blind, whether as a result of the radiation no one knows.  She always had macular degeneration, but it seems to have progressively worsened.  Still, she cooked for the family Christmas Eve, and we all gathered at her house for our smaller annual get-together.

It didn’t feel the same, though.  I kept worrying that I hadn’t taken enough pictures, but I did not want to her to think I was deliberately taking pictures because I expected her to keel over at any moment.  For the same reason, I brought our video camera but left it in the bag, never even using it once.  I don’t want to admit she is going to die, either, and yet the whole time we were together, I kept thinking, “This might be the last one.  The last Christmas.”  Even if she is still alive next year, will she be healthy?

As far as gifts received this year, nothing really bears mentioning except one item that Brendan DID NOT receive.  When we arrived at Lynn’s mother’s house on Christmas Day, we discovered that my brother-in-law had bought his kids a Wii.  Most of Brendan’s toys were forgotten once he discovered the power of this video game system.  He has become an ace bowler, much better than me, in just a couple days.  What’s really funny is that he takes great pleasure in telling me how to play.  And when I roll a really bad frame, he says, “Terrible, terrible,” in his most discouraging voice.

I have to hand it to the developers at Nintendo, they really came up with a brilliant idea with the Wii.  It’s target audience is only secondarily children; the primary audience is parents who buy the system.  What better way to get parents to buy a video game console than to incorporate physical activity into the games?  It relieves a lot of parental guilt in letting a child play “sedentary” video games, and on top of that, kids love it.

The games in the Wii Sports collection are incredibly simple and take me back to the bowling, golf, and boxing games that I played as a kid on the Atari 2600.  What’s more, some of them, like boxing, really do give you a workout.  My brother-in-law and I were both exhausted after playing a few rounds of boxing.  You have to dodge, swing the controller, and generally engage in some actual aerobic exercise…and it’s fun.  I never thought exercise and fun could be part of the same thing.

That’s not to say that playing the Wii is equivalent to an hour at the gym, but it doesn’t hurt, either.  Brendan wants one of these game systems, and we will probably buy him one for his birthday in April.  I loved playing with him, even if he did beat me over and over.

First we’ve got to find one.  I wanted to price the Wii at Target last night…sold out.  Best Buy…sold out.  Both stores had plenty of Playstation 3’s, however.