In appreciation of the Friendly's peg board game
Happy Thanksgiving!
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Hello dear subscribers,
For the past month and a half, I’ve had writer’s block. I’ve written seven drafts of essays/newsletters that were simply not good enough to grace your eyeballs.
I could blame it on being busy (
and I launched ! It’s been so much fun! Please check it out and review and like and subscribe!) or on the election, or the fact that the sun goes down almost as soon as it rises these days, but the truth is that I’m not totally sure why I clammed up.My difficulty writing this newsletter sort of compounded on itself, like when someone texts you and you don’t text them back, and then the longer you wait to text them back the more embarrassed you are that you haven’t texted them back, and then you feel paralyzed by your guilt and physically can’t text them back.
I figured that if I didn’t just sit down and write something, my brain was going to explode. So here we are. I thought I’d tell you all of this because it feels nice to be honest, and maybe some of you are experiencing something similar. I always feel better knowing I’m not alone in what feels like a very specific — but is probably quite universal — neuroticism.
So, in light of this being the week of Thanksgiving, I’d like to tell you about something I’m grateful for. I’m obviously grateful for my family, my friends, their health, and my little career here on the internet. I could get very mushy about all of it, because I am a lucky and sentimental person, but I am going to spare you.
Instead, I’m going to tell you this peg board game I used to play at Friendly’s with my dad.
I don’t know if anyone who didn’t grow up in Massachusetts has ever been to a Friendly’s. But a quick Google search tells me that they a) still exist after going bankrupt in 2010 and b) appear to be have franchises in many states, so the odds are decent.
If you haven’t been to a Friendly’s, it’s a dinette chain originally founded in the 1930s in Springfield, MA. In the 90s, it was basically a fast food place that dressed up like it was in the musical Grease, if the musical also sold ice cream cakes with Disney characters on them. The booths were (are?) covered in red pleather, and they used (use?) dish ware that used to be lame but is now considered cool, and that you will find in many Brooklyn restaurants. You know, the fluted metal ice cream bowls and the silver sundae trays and the plates that are off-white and thick.
When I was little, my dad used to take my friends and me to Friendly’s on Saturdays after soccer games. We’d click-clack in with our dirty cleats, and the whole experience was a thrill. My dad turned it into the most special adventure every time we went; I have the clearest memories of sitting across from him in the booth while he made us and the servers laugh.
The ice cream at Friendly’s used to come with a scoop of ice cream as a face, a cone as a hat, two little poofs of whipped cream as hair, and Reese’s Pieces as the eyes and nose. These decorations were supposed to make your dessert look like a clown, and by golly, they nailed it. I can still taste the fudge that went around the rim of the cone. The chocolate was sort of rubbery and the cone was usually stale. I absolutely loved it.
The tables had those big metal napkin-holders on them, but they also had this. The Friendly’s I.Q. Tester. The peg board game of my dreams:
As you can see above, the peg board game at Friendly’s revolved around the cherry on top of the banana split (honestly though, what doesn’t?). The Supreme Edition featured above describes the rules thusly:
Start with any one hole empty
As you jump the pegs
Remove them from the board
To win — leave last peg in the cherry
Ultimate challenge — leave only the red peg in the cherry.
First of all, that’s a poem. Second of all, I’m going to be very honest with you: I never really understood how to play this game.
I just liked that the pegs came in the little holder, that the little holder was attached to the game, and that the game involved moving little pegs around the board. I must have played by the rules at some point, but they was less interesting to me than the object itself. It was even more exciting than crayons and a paper placemat, which is saying something.
But then the food would come, and the perfectly griddled hot dog would completely consume me as I consumed it.
A few weeks ago, my husband, Tyler, and I were in this little shop in our neighborhood in Brooklyn called Woods Grove. We call it Woods Hole, because Woods Hole is an oceanographic institute in Massachusetts, and while you can take the girl out of New England, you cannot take the New England out of the girl. They (the shop, not the oceanographic institute) sell candles and housewares, greeting cards and little gifts, as well as odds and ends.
One of those odds and ends was this game:
It is similar to the Friendly’s game, but there’s no little cup, and it’s a triangle instead of a square. The rules are that you jump the pegs over each other, remove the pegs as they get jumped, and “try to leave only one peg.”
I played it in the store for so long that I eventually realized Tyler was laughing and taking photos of me from across the store.
Here is what that looked like, a story in three parts:
I was transported back to being a little kid shopping with my mom — Tyler was like, “Do you want to buy that?” And I was like, “Yes.” So I asked one of the people who worked there if they had any unopened ones, and she said yes. She looked for a while until she realized she did not, in fact, have an unopened one, so I said, “Can I buy the demo?” And she was like, “Uh, sure.”
So I did. And when I tell you that this little game has brightened my life……
I have been trying to be on my phone less, because being on my phone generally makes me feel bad. I’ve been reading a lot (not to brag), but sometimes I want to just completely turn off every thought in my brain while still doing something with my hands. I was doing embroidery for a bit, but for some reason I stopped. And that’s where this little game comes in.
I could sit on the couch playing this game forever. It is the perfect level of difficulty. I have won the game a few times, but right after I solve it, I promptly forget how I did it. So then I can just keep playing until I solve it again and immediately forget what I did again. It’s heaven.
The night of the election, when I realized things were not looking good for Kamala Harris and the future of our country, I got into bed, put headphones on, listened to classical music, and played the game for an hour. I solved it once. It felt great while everything else did….not. I went to bed.
So I guess what I’m saying is that the peg board helps me do something that feels — in the year of our lord, 2024 — radical: it helps me stay exactly in the present.
I’m not thinking about what I did or didn’t do, or what did or didn’t happen, and I’m not thinking about what I will or won’t do, or what will or won’t happen. I’m just thinking about the best strategy for making sure only one peg is left on the board, and how lovely it was to be eight years old eating a hot dog with my dad and my best friends in a travel soccer uniform and shin guards at a Friendly’s in Concord, MA.
Doesn’t get much better than that, folks.
I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving, and that you find some tiny slice of joy (highly suggest the peg board game) to brighten up these darkening days.
And as my mom likes to remind me — after December 21st, the days are only getting lighter.
Welcome back, Charlotte. The triangle brings back to mind the time a lunch group would spend at the local diners around the Plants where I worked. In my early career we didn’t have cell phones, let alone social media to occupy our time ignoring each other while waiting for our food. So we needed the triangles to avoid having to talk to each other. Not much has changed save for a lot of technology which makes it even easier to not converse as we all have our own device and don’t have to wait our turn.
I made the triangular version in my middle school woodshop class, and like you I was obsessed with discovering all the different ways to solve it. I kept it in my dresser for many years, and was actually a little disappointed to discover it not there today (we called it Chinese Checkers; why I do not know).