"What Mario is Missing"

I don’t consider myself an old fogey. I blog with some regularity and keep the gray in my hair highlighted blonde. I work out and drink Starbucks. I’ve traveled from the West Coast to the East Coast piggyback on a Harley and through the streets of Hanoi on the back of a moped. I’ve heard Gillian Welch strum her bluegrass at the Station Inn in Nashville and slept on ice-covered slopes of ancient mountains.
But no matter how far I travel or how long I live, I will never for the life of me understand the video-gaming craze that has immobilized our nation by turning generations of children and adults alike into glassy-eyed, callused-thumbed, button-pushing catatonics.
Nintendo Co. Ltd. announced that it sold 600,000 units of its new Wii video game console in the first eight days after its U.S. release. Teachers and managers better brace themselves for the post-holiday-letdown, which is sure to include thousands of video addicts going through withdrawal.
The last time I played a video game was back in the early 1980s when Mario scuttled across blocks. While I thought Mario was cute in that Danny Devito way, I found him as insufferable as Borat. Not to mention B-O-R-I-N-G. I junked the Nintendo and never bought another.
I grew up in a Georgia trailer park, replete with cinder blocks and window air conditioner, so I’ll spare you the details of how idyllic my childhood wasn’t. Even so, it was a childhood filled with wonder and magic, the two essential ingredients for happiness at any age.
Mama was the wizard in our home. Every night, my brother Frankie and I would sit at the kitchen table in our pajamas as she read to us from a hardback book. We learned about the ark Noah built and Jacob’s colorful robe. We learned about the Queen of Sheba and King David. After she read the stories, Mama would question us, to make sure we had paid attention. If we could answer the questions right, Mama would give us a dime. Because he was older and smarter, Frankie got more of the money than I. But I didn’t resent it. I wasn’t in it for the money. I was in it for the story.
The very first book I checked out of the school library and read on my own was Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time.” This was years before Scottie was beaming the captain on “Star Trek,” but I felt transported to a place filled with wonder by the tesseract L’Engle created.
At school, SRA reading lab, not recess, was my favorite part of the day. I liked the order and quiet it provided, but mostly I just liked the stories. Tales of flying cars, the kind George Jetson drove, and dolphins that talked to one another through squeaks and air bubbles.
During summers, when I wasn’t swimming, I was reading. The bookmobile would pull up at the entry to the trailer park every other week. On those days, I’d leave my bathing suit hanging on the back of the bathroom door, brush my hair, scrub my face and hands, and put on my best summer dress. I was always the first in line, waiting outside the manager’s office, screaming to the others when I saw the diesel-fueled bus rolling down Morris Road.
No books were ever off-limits to me. I read all the adventures of the Lennon Sisters and Nancy Drew. I read about Oliver, a real orphan boy. And a girl named Scout and a rabid dog. I read every Gothic story Victoria Holt wrote and the scandalous “The Happy Hooker,” which Mama had stuffed in the drawer by her bed, along with her True Crime magazines, which I also read. When everyone else at school was reading “The Exorcist,” I was reading “Wuthering Heights” and “The Scarlet Letter.” I tried but couldn’t read Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” because Mama worked nights and the book scared the dickens out of me.
Reading has been a tesseract for me. Like a magic carpet, it transports me across dimensions of time and space to worlds beyond my imagination.
That’s something Nintendo will never be able to do.
--By Karen Spears Zacharias, Fayetteville Observer, Dec. 21, 2006