my sometimes-skeptical social commentary

Father and Son Monopoly

Here’s the game of Monopoly my son and I were playing last night. I took this photo when it was time for him to go to bed–we weren’t done playing, so instead of leaving the gameboard on the floor, I snapped this picture to show where our playing pieces were and where the houses had been built on our properties. I used the camera’s photo-editing feature to add the text to note how much money was on Free Parking.

I told my son how we used to save games by writing down all the details of the game, including how much money each player has, what properties they own, how many houses or hotels were built on each property, and where their playing pieces were. I said I wished I had a digital camera back then.

Kodak Instamatic Camera

And then I thought, back when I was his age, I had my own camera. It was a Kodak camera that took used actual film, and even though film was cheap enough for a kid my age to buy with his allowance, developing it took a little more money, and it took time, because where I lived, we had to mail out our film and wait for it to be developed and the prints mailed back to us.

Now, I have a digital camera and video recorder built into my phone, and I will probably never print 99% of the photos I shoot with it. I email them to myself, mostly, and sometimes I post them, or just email them to someone else. The video recordings I make with it are even less-likely to see the light of day, because the sound quality is annoyingly rough.

I titled this post “a boy becomes a man” because I was thinking, when my son asked me to play Monopoly with him, that we haven’t played Monopoly together yet. I doubted him when he said he knew how to play, but he assured me that the day before, he had played with his grandmother.

We played the game and had fun. I bought every property I landed on until I ran out of cash, and he did likewise. When it was possible to make a deal to get a monopoly, I offered him two properties in exchange for one of his, which gave us both a monopoly (and gave him an additional railroad).

This is a milestone in a boy’s life. (I’m sure it is for a girl’s life, too, don’t assume I’m sexist, but I happen to have been a boy when I was younger, and I don’t have a daughter.) Games like this are opportunities for a boy to challenge his dad, the way I did when I played Monopoly with my dad, and sometimes win.

But I assure you, when we resume this game, I have no intention of letting him win.

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