That Is Not Pikachu

My daughter awkwardly grips the gray, plastic brick in her small hands as she uses the little cross-shaped D pad to move her tiny pixelated self through clumps of equally pixelated grass. The original Gameboy she’s holding is the twin of the one that got me through many a lengthy car ride back when I was her age. I see the telltale exclamation point pop up over one of the NPC sprite’s heads and know she is in for a battle. She frowns at the tiny square screen as the tinny music plays, then turns her quizzical gaze up at me.

“What is that?”

“That’s the Pikachu you just caught.”

“That is not Pikachu,” she insists, wrinkling her cute little nose.

“It’s Pikachu’s head. From behind,” I clarify.

She gives me a look that clearly states she thinks I’ve lost my marbles. “It’s a potato with horns and a tail.”

I’m so proud; at barely eight years old, my little girl is giving me snark at a tenth-grade level. She’s well ahead of her peers.

“No, see, he’s got a stripe. It’s Pikachu.”

“Whatever you say.” She glances over at her Switch, which is currently charging on the end table, and I know she’s doing a mental compare-and-contrast. Let’s Go, Pikachu! is her favorite game, after all, beating out Cooking Mama, Animal Crossing, and—surprisingly—Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.

“Just select a move, okay?” I tell her. “This kid’s got a level seven Caterpie. You can beat him.”

“Why does the Caterpie get to look like a Caterpie when Pikachu looks so weird?” she asks even as she studies the three attack choices in the lower portion of the screen. (Her brand-new Pikachu has not yet learned a fourth move.)

“Life’s not fair. Even for Pokemon,” I reply, leaning closer to see which move she’ll choose.

This is a big moment. Her first trainer battle with Pikachu. Though she started with Squirtle, she made it clear she was looking to capture a Pikachu at her first opportunity so it could be her go-to starter. Poor Squirtle was going to have to wait in line, pining away for the days of being first choice, and fantasizing futilely about one day becoming a Wartortle.

All the sights and sounds of this game bring me back, and it’s a little surreal that I’m sitting here enjoying this moment with my daughter and this extra-large chonk of a handheld game. I don’t believe in fate, and even if I did, I wouldn’t believe that fate would waste its time putting retro game consoles in my path. It seems like fate has better stuff to do. 

But this moment feels meant just the same.

See, I have an addiction to garage sales. It must be because I’m very nosy and the only other ways I could possibly see other people’s stuff on a regular basis would be to become either a cat burglar or a real estate agent. Or both. Huh… there might be a Netflix series in there somewhere. Anyway, since both those other options would require too much time and effort, garage sales are my solace and my saving grace. 

Though my MO is usually to browse endlessly and buy very little, the other day when I saw the familiar rectangular shape of my favorite childhood pastime on a table piled with old toys, I snatched it up and prepared my bargaining face. It’s hard to describe my bargaining face, but let me tell you—if you saw it, you would feel compelled to give me a ten percent discount on anything I wanted to buy. I brought the OG Gameboy up to the proprietor of the sale, prepared to negotiate until my lips turned blue. 

The woman looked up from her phone, glanced at the device in my hands, and grunted, “Fifteen bucks.”

Since I’d been prepared to hear upwards of a hundred, my bargaining face was unfortunately replaced with my shocked face, which is distinctly less confident and intimidating. 

“Fifteen?” I repeated, thinking maybe I’d misheard her. Maybe she meant fifteen hundred?

“Alright fine. Ten.”

“Ten dollars.”

“I’m not going lower than that, lady.”

If Blackbeard himself had walked up to me and said, “Look, I’ve got way too much treasure on my hands these days. Would you mind taking a chest or two off my hands?” I would have been no less flabbergasted.

Thanks to a bargaining tactic I hadn’t known I possessed—looking vaguely appalled and shellshocked whilst helplessly parroting everything the salesperson said—I walked away moments later, not with pirate gold, but with something I considered treasure nonetheless. 

It was in no way shocking to discover that the copy of Pokemon Red I found on eBay cost more than five times as much as the Gameboy itself. Not everyone, it seemed, was oblivious to the worth of these ancient artifacts.

Sharing it with my daughter had been an interesting experiment. After I received the game in the mail, I had to pull her away from her current session of Let’s Go, Pikachu! in order to put a relic from my childhood in her hands and try to get her jazzed for the exact same adventure, only pixelated, monochromatic, and significantly more dependent on level grinding. What surprised me most when I first booted it up was that I felt nearly desperate for her to like it. It is impossible to describe the nature of the relief that followed when, despite her ongoing sarcastic commentary worthy of Mystery Science Theater 3000, she got invested in playing.

We’ve made a little time for it every day since.

I feel a swell of pride as I lean over her shoulder and watch her Pikachu kick the ever-loving crap out of an innocent Caterpie. (At least, I assume it’s innocent; maybe this particular Caterpie has done hard time.) My girl smiles over her victory as she ruthlessly divests a small child of half his money. And it dawns on me why I feel so emotionally invested in this: She holds in her hands a bridge that connects her childhood directly to mine, seamlessly merging what is with what was.

“We can stop here if you want,” I offer. “You can go back to the Switch.”

She leans her head against my arm. “Nah. This one’s cool, too.”

I feel an aching warmth in my heart as I recognize the gift she is giving me.

“Okay,” I murmur. “Let’s go get ‘em.”