January 5, 2018:
Sometimes I would take an earlier bus. I hated getting up sooner, but there was a single point of fascination about that neighborhood I found worth exploring. One stop past my usual on Garnet was a miniature golf course with a pinball arcade and a slot car track. I'd invest my lunch money in Flipper Cowboy or Shangri-La, or my favorite, the submarine game where you peer through a periscope and try to time your torpedo shots to hit the cargo ships sailing left to right. I loved the torpedo sounds it made, and was mesmerized by the way it cheated, speeding-up the ships at the last moment before your torpedo struck. Those games drew me into their tiniest details, in that way young children feel they can climb inside sounds or colors or shapes while their brains are laser-focused on learning the world.
Slot cars were paradigms of that fascinated hyper-attention. In fourth grade a slot car hobby was unaffordable, but I loved to watch, and loved the ozone smell of electrical engines. It required true mental investment in calculating just when and how much momentum to bleed to take curves without spinning out, or how aggressively drivers could accelerate down the straightaway and still make the first turn. Lacking funds, I was only able to play intermittently. Birthday money normally went to records, and I certainly was not going to inform my parental unit I was hanging around slot car tracks. I feared she'd conflate them with horse racing and have a breakdown over her fourth-grader's all-too-early gambling addiction. Or find some other way to interpret the sport as both expensive and seedy. In the rare times I was able to play, my brain became a kind of racing engine of its own, calculating in real time the two-dimensional vector physics required for success. Not yet in that language, of course.
Leaving was always disheartening. The arcade was interesting, with worthwhile things to learn. Leaving meant school, where at least until recess it would not be interesting and the major lessons had already been plenty internalized: that the kids were mean, the teachers evil, I didn't belong there, and my once-and-never-future joy of school was permanently past.