Illustration: Mark Long‘Can I bring my switch?’: A family holiday throws up existential questions
Last year I spent four months teaching in Boston with my wife and son. It was amazing to immerse ourselves in another culture. It was also amazing, as a freelancer, to get holiday pay, and I wanted to take full advantage of it. When I was growing up in Ireland, my family would spend two weeks every summer in a caravan near Skibbereen. Rain-lashed, defiantly entertainment-free, these trips had no clear objective other than to make us appreciate not being on holiday. They made the world seem smaller, somehow, as if a door had been flung open to reveal a dingy cupboard.
I wanted to give my 10-year-old son a vacation that he’d remember for ever. New York City: surely the opposite of a bleak field in Cork. “It’s where they made Ghostbusters, Spider-Man, Enchanted!” we told him. “It’s literally the most exciting place on Earth!”
“Will I be able to bring my Switch?” my son wanted to know.
We exchanged glances. Being away, we had let some of our Nintendo restrictions slide; we wondered if he – if we – hadn’t become a bit dependent on it. But once we got there, surely the magic of Manhattan would blow his mind sufficiently to restore him to the world, the actual world? “Sure,” we said.
My wife and I first visited New York many years ago, before we were married. It was February, and freezing: Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s installation The Gates lit up Central Park with brilliant flame-like pennants set against the icy blue sky. We went to the Frick and MoMA and the Met. We saw celebrities, just walking around. Ben Stiller, Steve Shelley from Sonic Youth. A passerby asked Mike Myers if anyone had ever told him he looked just like Mike Myers: “All my life,” he said. In a chutney restaurant in SoHo we saw Natalie Portman.
“You know who she is?” I said to my son, as we reminisced. “Natalie Portman, from Star Wars?”
But he didn’t care about movie stars: his heroes were YouTube gamers called things like AntDude and Copycat, grown men who sat around all day playing Luigi’s Mansion 3.
In fact he didn’t immediately get the appeal of the city. We took him across Brooklyn Bridge. “This bridge is world famous,” I told him. “What does it do?” “Well, it’s a bridge. I mean, it connects with the other side.” “Hmm,” he said.
I was pretty sure he’d enjoy the Egyptian rooms at the Met. Look, there was Set! And Osiris! And Bast! We all had PhD-level knowledge of myth from reading Rick Riordan books. He dutifully examined each exhibit. Yet he still seemed … not melancholy, exactly, more distrait, as if his thoughts were elsewhere, a bit like the heroine of a 19th-century novel who has secretly fallen for some horse-riding type.
“Is everything OK?” I asked.
“I’m just wondering if there’ll be time to play my Switch when I get back to the hotel,” he said.
“Didn’t you play Switch this morning?”
“I’m on holiday,” he said.
“Holidays aren’t about doing what you want,” I told him. “We’re here to experience a place. We’re here to spend time together, as a family.”
My son looked genuinely horrified. “Amn’t I supposed to be enjoying myself?”
“No,” I said, and then, “What I mean is, there are other ways to enjoy yourself. This is a famously enjoyable city.”
He shook his head, as if trying to wake himself from a bad dream. I felt annoyed. This trip was costing me a fortune. It might not be blowing his mind, but it was certainly blowing my wallet.
“You should be counting your blessings,” I said. “When I was a kid we had to go to Cork.”
Now my son looked sad. We were all sad.
There was more sadness on the way. The next morning, my wife discovered that we had left the charger for the Switch at home. I kept a cool head. “Oh shit,” I said.
We peeked into the bedroom, where my son was deeply immersed in a game of Super Animal Royale.
“Maybe it’s a good thing if he can’t play for a few days?” my wife whispered. But we knew that it would be a bad thing, a very bad thing.
The only option was to ration out the remaining charge. “Hey pal!” I said with false bonhomie. “You know there are other things to do, right here in the hotel?”
“Oh yes?” he said politely, not looking up from the screen.
“There’s a swimming pool? And there are movies, on the TV? Would you like to watch a movie?”
“No thanks,” he said, then, “Hmm, better charge the Switch.”
I exhaled. I was regretting my draconian stance on screen time yesterday. Now he’d think I’d left the charger behind on purpose, in the name of being together as a family! My mind flashed back to those holidays in Skibbereen, the grim forced marches through the rain with nothing to look forward to but fresh air …
“Well, the thing is,” I said. “We can’t charge the Switch right now because … ”
“Because we’re going to the Nintendo store!” my wife interrupted.
“There’s a Nintendo store?” I repeated.
“There’s a Nintendo store?!” My son was so excited that he momentarily put down his actual Nintendo.
“Yes!” my wife said, flourishing her phone with a somewhat maniacal look. “The flagship store is in Rockefeller Plaza.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. Of course there was a Nintendo store. This was the centre of global capitalism. Good old capitalism!
My wife thought we should get the charger right away. But the fact that the good people of Nintendo had seen fit to grace New York with their presence had given the city a real boost in my son’s eyes. Excited that he’d shown an interest in a location actually to be found on planet Earth, I thought we could use the store visit as a carrot to lure him to other destinations – a kind of tourism by stealth.
First stop was the Empire State Building, now so colossally expensive that King Kong would probably give it a pass. “This is a world-famous view,” I told my son. “You can see the whole of Manhattan from here.” “Can you see the Nintendo store?” he asked. I checked. “No,” I said. My son frowned. “It’s still there,” I assured him. “But you can’t see it,” he said. “Right, but I can’t see lots of things and they still exist.” “But you don’t know for sure.” “Your family is adorable,” a woman told my wife.
We rented bikes and went cycling around Central Park. “Look at all the colours,” I said, pointing to the trees. “People have written songs about being here in the autumn.” “Right,” my son said. “You’re not looking,” I said. “I get it, it’s world famous,” he said. “It’s not just that it’s world famous,” I said, although, in fact, it was. “I’m just worrying the Nintendo store might be closing soon,” he said. “It’s 11am,” I pointed out. My son looked unassuaged. He was willing to humour me, up to a point. But the fact was that he regarded any part of the city that was not 10 Rockefeller Plaza essentially as a meaningless frippery. Still, I wasn’t giving way. “We’re here to see some damn culture,” I said, using a word other than damn.
And so to MoMA. My son’s class had done a project on Van Gogh’s The Starry Night in school; I wanted to show him the real thing. The halls were crowded. We couldn’t find The Starry Night. “It doesn’t matter, Dad. I already know what it looks like.” “Ah, here we go,” I said, spotting a scrum of people in a corner, shoving and waving their phones in the air. “Back off,” a guard warned the crowd. “I just want to take a picture of it so I can leave,” a woman with a dog in a papoose shouted.
I rolled my eyes at the guard in solidarity. But was I any different? Except that instead of a dog I had a 10-year-old? And instead of a picture on my phone I wanted to install a memory in his head so he’d someday think I was a good parent? This was why we never went on family holidays – because they threw up unanswerable existential questions.
We trailed along the streets. My son needed to pee. “Why didn’t you pee in MoMA?” I snapped. I was extra-tetchy now because I too needed to pee.
Then I stopped. Something about this SoHo storefront was familiar. Could it be … yes! “The chutney restaurant! Remember, darling? From the first time we were here?”
My wife didn’t seem as excited as I was. “What’s chutney?” my son asked. “It’s like jam, only made out of spicy vegetables,” my wife said.
“I think we should go in,” I said.
“It sounds gross,” my son said.
“It is,” my wife said. “It is gross.”
“Let’s go in,” I said. “For old times’ sake?”
My wife gazed at me expressionlessly. “Do you think she’ll be there? Do you genuinely think she’s been waiting there all this time, in case some day you return?”
“Who?” I said. “I just thought you guys might like some chutney.”
They set off down the street. Natalie! I cried silently.
But life doesn’t give second chances. It only leads one way – in this instance to 10 Rockefeller Plaza.
A retail assistant in red overalls greeted us as we entered the store. Everywhere we looked were inventive diversifications of Nintendo IP – T-shirts, headgear, giant anthropomorphised mushrooms – and giant plastic statues of Mario, Bowser, Link et al. My son absorbed this, open mouthed. I thought of Stendhal fainting at the beauty of the Basilica of Santa Croce.
But there was more. Upstairs, we found a video wall, featuring the latest Mario release. “Grab a controller,” a staffer suggested. My son didn’t need telling twice.
There were couches for jaded adults. I parked myself beside my wife. “I don’t get what the difference is between playing on a big screen and playing on his Switch,” I said.
“That’s because you’re not 10,” she said.
“This hasn’t worked out like I expected,” I lamented. “I wanted to blow his mind.”
“His mind is blown,” she said. “You think he’ll ever forget this?”
“I suppose,” I conceded. I took out my phone, started going through my inbox.
“Do you remember the zoo?” my wife said.
When he was very small, we lived near Dublin zoo. We used to visit nearly every week. Our son always made a beeline past the enclosures to a vending machine beside the orangutan habitat. That a machine could sell crisps and chocolate was interesting enough, but what really captivated him was the frieze at the bottom, a parade of cartoon animals. “There’s a lion,” he’d say, pointing. “There’s a penguin.” “They have an actual lion just over there,” we’d tell him. “And penguins, loads of penguins, real ones.” But to no avail. Every trip went the same way; we spent countless hours beside that vending machine, accumulated hundreds of pictures of him next to it, beaming as if it was his long-lost twin brother.
Parents don’t get to decide how your mind is blown; in fact, that may be the point, that they’re banished to the sidelines, that the world is speaking to you in a register they can’t understand. To me, 10 Rockefeller Plaza, with its shelves of plasticated merch, is as craven and stultifying as any other store: but to my son, it’s the closest you can get – on a regular Earthbound city street – to entering a myth.
“Things are much bigger in New York,” my son said as we finally left.
“The skyscrapers?”
“The screens,” he said. “Did you know this is the only Nintendo store outside of Japan?”
“I did not.”
“It’s world famous.” He was feeling expansive now. “What will we do now? Are there more bridges you want to see?”
“How about some food?”
“Great,” he said, then, “Not chutney.”
We headed for the subway. “Tomorrow I might go back to the Nintendo store,” he said casually.
“Oh yeah?” I said. “I’ll go with you.”
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