In a previous blog, I gave examples of how African American people have shown me that they support our racially mixed family.
I have also previously related that Matthew Walter and I spent the night out on his birthday. One of the things that we did was go to a place that could have been named “kid’s heaven”. It had every kind of video game in existence. There were all these virtual reality machines that you could get in and it made you feel like you were on a roller coaster or flying on a crop duster. It also had a bowling alley, lots of junk food and a laser tag facility.
We were lucky in that we were there on a Monday night and you could buy a free pass ticket. For $10, you could do anything and everything for as long as you could stand it. He wanted to go play laser tag and I opted to sit in a comfortable chair and wait for it to be over. He was thinking, “What is next?” and I was thinking, “Where can I sit down?”
He had already gone in to get his gear on. An African American family came along and their children wanted to play laser tag also. They went in and their grandfather sat down with me and started up a conversation. He said something about his grandchildren wearing him out. He looked to be a little older than me and he looked the way that I felt, tired. He asked if I was there with my grandchildren.
I told him that I was there with my son. We had some time, so I told him a little bit about our family. People are usually interested and we talked for a while. The fact that my boy is African American never came up in the conversation.
The laser tag game was over and the kids came out. There was a twinkle in his eye when he saw Matthew Walter. We instantly went from having a conversation to kill time to being good buddies.
His grandchildren and my son all wanted to do it again. My new friend and I looked at each other and it was obvious that we were thinking the same thing. A few minutes later, we were helping each other strap on the laser tag equipment. We were going to show the kids that even though we are getting older, we still knew how to play. It was a lot of fun.
Related Blogs:
Becoming an Adoptive Parent: Adjustments I Had to Make