Sara, and the games she taught me

This is from field day at the end of third grade, May 1997. That is me on the left, laughing, jammed into a burlap sack with my friend Sara for the two-person sack race. We did not win. I am fairly sure we fell over.

Sara lived at the very end of our street in St. John. She is one of the friends I named in my third-grade memory book, and one of the ones I had to say goodbye to when we moved away that summer.

She is also the person who handed me a surprising number of the things I loved as a kid. She introduced me to Brain Bash, a little electronic game from around 1995 with four sides that fired quick math at you, addition and subtraction as fast as you could tap. It was basically Bop It, but for numbers, and I adored it. I still have one in a box somewhere, a physical 1995 gadget that, against all odds, still works. I am pretty sure she is also the reason I ever held a Bop It in the first place. She had one, and that was it for me.

And then there is the memory I cannot quite pin down. Somewhere in those St. John days, I remember a basement full of computers. Her dad did something with them, I think, and there were machines wired into other machines, parts and cables everywhere, gloriously messy in a way I found completely fascinating. We were not allowed to touch any of it, and I only ever saw it in passing, but it stuck. I cannot prove it, but I have always felt like that basement was one of the small, early cogs that slowly turned my whole life toward computers.

Funny how a sack race and a friend at the end of the street can end up sitting right at the start of everything.