THE FUSE

Every dad has a memory like this one. You’re eight or nine, it’s a Saturday, and you’ve just spent twenty minutes positioning and hooking everything up, including rewinding the tape so your Commodore 64 will load a game before your mum needs the TV back. Or you’re standing in a milk bar with a pocketful of coins, watching some kid three years older than you clear the second loop on the arcade cabinet you’ve been feeding for a week straight. That stuff doesn’t leave you. It just goes quiet for a few decades while you’re busy with mortgages and school pickups.