Tilt

I have made it a hobby of mine over the years to take kids on outings that they may not get to do all the time. While this isn't more than once a month, I find life in spending time with kids and seeing life from their perspective.

So one of the favorite picks is "Tilt." Tilt is the local arcade that charges outrageous prices for video games. I limit each child to $5, and depending upon the child's interests, the outing can last anywhere from 10 minutes or less to over an hour. Each time I go I am in awe of how different God wired all of us. They have the same games every time I go, but each kid gravitates to different ones.

I usually go with Jay, the student I have tutored for years. Jay is autistic and his motivation to get a book done with me (75 lessons!) is an outing to Tilt with me. Jay is very good at the shoot-em-up video games, and so an outing with him to Tilt is a minimum hour. He is good at the games, and will typically beat the game he's on in an hour and still have tokens left over. Then we blow what's left on ticket games so he can take home prizes that would cost at least half that price at your local Wal-Mart. I'm headed to Tilt with him tomorrow, as it's my last full day here and I wanted to spend my last afternoon with him. It only seemed right that way. :-)

Today, I went with D.D. He is also autistic and we had initially planned on doing the indoor golf at the mall and he changed his mind. I didn't care what we did. My ankle was better today than it's been in a while so I was up for golf, but he asked if we could do Tilt instead. I learned a lot from him tonight.

He got his tokens and walked over to one of the "claw" games. Now, for those of you who haven't stepped foot in an arcade in the last decade, we now have TONS of games where you can put a coin in, move a "claw" around and drop it in this bin where you hope you get a toy caught in the claw. They have stuffed animals, bouncy balls, and even electronic games on the more expensive ones. I will admit, I have always steered clear of the "claw." This has been for two reasons: first off, they are filled with toys that I don't need so why waste my time on it? And secondly, you lose more than you win, so it's a waste of time. It's like betting on strip in Vegas in my book. I wanted to tell D.D. both these things as he immediately put 8 tokens into a claw game! He only had 24 total, so I wanted to discourage him from "wasting" them. I was glad I didn't though. He was okay with losing, and honestly, he would walk over to another claw and say "That one looks easy," and try again. He didn't quit, and he did manage to win 3 stuffed animals in the span of his 15 minutes with tokens. He just enjoyed playing, and wouldn't quit. He would try and try and try again. He didn't once think, "This is a rip-off." He just kept trying and kept saying, "This looks easy."

How much can we learn from D.D.? I know I was standing there going, "Man, I need faith like that kid." He wasn't discouraged at all, and was determined not to give up. He just kept playing. Once he was out of tokens he turned to me and said, "That was fun, thanks Ms. S."

Gosh, don't we all need a bit of faith like that?...Seriously...

Life.
Is.
Good.