Permanent Record

what was happening on TV.

---

I had come face-to-face with a Commodore 64—one of the first home
computer systems on the market.
I had no idea what a computer was, of course, let alone whether what
my father was doing on it was playing a game or working. Although he was
smiling and seemed to be having fun, he was also applying himself to what
was happening on-screen with the same intensity with which he applied
himself to every mechanical task around the house. I knew only one thing:
whatever he was doing, I wanted to do it, too.
After that, whenever my father came into the den to break out the beige
brick, I’d stand up on my bed, tug away the curtain, and spy on his
adventures. One night the screen showed a falling ball and a bar at the
bottom; my father had to move the bar horizontally to hit the ball, bounce it
up, and knock down a wall of multicolored bricks (Arkanoid). On another
night, he sat before a screen of multicolored bricks in different shapes; they
were always falling, and as they fell he moved and rotated them to assemble
them into perfect rows, which immediately vanished (Tetris). I was truly
confused, however, about what my father was doing—recreation or part of
his job—when I peeked through the window one night and saw him flying.
My father—who’d always delighted me by pointing out the real
helicopters from the Coast Guard Air Base when they flew by the house—
was piloting his own helicopter right here, right in front of me, in our den.
He took off from a little base, complete with a tiny waving American flag,
into a black night sky full of twinkling stars, and then immediately crashed
to the ground. He gave a little cry that masked my own, but just when I
thought the fun was over, he was right back at the little base again with the
tiny flag, taking off one more time.
The game was called Choplifter! and that exclamation point wasn’t just