Rant #2,611: Doctor My Eyes

Today is vaccine day for me, and I have to tell you, I am more nervous about finding the place that I have to get this thing at than actually getting the shot.
 
It is located in a part of Long Island that I don’t know very well, and I saw the directions, and they are kind of involved.
 
I know that I will find it, but I will leave plenty early from home to get there, just to make sure I don’t get lost, as I will be going by myself to this place.
 
It should be an adventure unto itself.
 
But let me venture back to another time, a time when the words “coronavirus” and “pandemic” were not on anybody’s mind or at the top of anybody’s tongues.
 
1966 was quite a year.
 
I was all of nine years old, really discovering my new world and my new neighborhood in Rochdale Village, South Jamaica, Queens, and quite frankly, I don’t think I had a care in the world, other than buying the newest comic books when they came out at my local card shop.
 
That was my world, as was baseball, but the Yankees really stunk that year, ending up in last place after years of dominance.
 
I loved TV, and later in the year, “The Monkees” premiered, and that did change my world quite a bit, and they were certainly “my” Beatles, for sure.
 
Nothing else mattered, or at least I can’t remember much else mattering, but when you are nine years old, you really aren’t old enough to know what matters and what doesn’t, to a certain extent.
 
Being nine years old, I was open to just about anything within reason, and I loved to play games of the tabletop variety, everything from Monopoly to Parcheesi to Challenge the Yankees to whatever new was coming out that my parents could buy me.
 
And that leads me to Dr. Nim.
 
I honestly don’t know how I got into this very strange, enticing and somewhat exciting game, but I got into it and got into it in a pretty big way.
 
It really wasn’t a tabletop game per se … it was more of a gizmo or gadget type of game, and it was so enticing.
 
It was billed as a “computer,” and in a way, it kind of was just that, a game that you could play against one on one, and it would react as if it had its own mind.

 
It used marbles, which you placed on the top portion of the game, either you or Dr. Nim would take turns rolling the marbles down the board, which was on a slant so that the marbles could roll down the board.
 
When it was your turn if you went first, there was a lever that you would move to your side, and then you would decide how many marbles you wanted to go down the game board to the bottom.
 
You could either roll down one, two or three marbles one after the other, and when you were done with your turn, there was a switch at the bottom that you would adjust for the good doctor to take his turn, and you would flick the same switch on the side that you used to get your marbles down the game.
 
Dr, Nim would then intuitively release marbles based on how the various levers in the game were set up, and then almost magically pass the turn over to you, and you would do the same thing, and then pass the game back to Dr, Nim, and he again would choose how many marbles to release to the bottom of the game.
 
And when it was over, the one with the last marble to go down the chute was the loser, and somehow, no matter what you did, Dr. Nim would never lose.
 
You could not beat Dr, Nim, and I mean, you could NEVER beat Dr, Nim at his own game.
 
Of course, the game was designed on probability and chance, but at nine years of age, who knew from that? I just tried to beat Dr, Nim, and I never could.
 
I just loved this game. It was so different than the board games I was used to, and certainly set me on my way to games like Strat-O-Matic baseball, a game run by cards and the roll of the dice and by probability and chance to a certain respect too.
 
But Dr, Nim set me up for all of that, and I just loved the game.
 
If memory serves me correctly, I think my sister broke the first Dr, Nim that I had, breaking the various levers that the game ran with, and I think I might have broken the second Dr, Nim that we had.

 
I think there might have been a third Dr, Nim, but by the time we moved from Queens to Long Island in 1971, the game was pretty much nothing but a memory for me, and over many years, the memory was still there, but that was about it … there were more important things to worry about.
 
Through the years, I thought about the game here and there, but just as a memory and little more than that.
 
Then the Internet happened, and just about everything was fair game when I discovered this new “toy,” and from time to time, I would look up what I could see about this very strange toy that had faded so much in my mind that I could not even remember its name.
 
But that little flicker of memory was still there, and once I finally figured out what its name was—and let me tell you, that took quite a long time to do—I vowed that one day, I would have my own Dr, Nim game to play once again.
 
This was not a constant thing, just a vow I made to myself that one day, I would play Dr, Nim once again.
 
Over the years, I brought this game up to people on the Internet, mainly on Facebook, and I found that people either remembered the game vividly from my description or had no idea what I was talking about.
 
I would check from time to tine on eBay and other places to see if it was available, and lo and behold, it was, but people were charging outrageous amounts for this game, one that cost probably less than $10 in 1966 but people were charging up to $150 for on the Web.
 
Well, I believed that my goal of playing Dr, Nim again would never happen, There was no way I was going to pay that price to play that game again, so Dr. Nim remained just a memory in my head for years and years and years.
 
Flash forward to this week …
 
I spoke to a long-time friend on the phone, a friend of mine who has some recent health problems that have laid him up pretty badly. He is recovering, but the more I spoke with him, the more I felt that I wanted to do something for him to make him feel better,
 
There is a local nostalgia store by me that I have really not frequented very much in all the time that it has been open. They have so many different things in this store that can bring back so many memories of your childhood that you really can get lost in this store—Star Trek, Star Wars, comic books, figurines, bubblegum cards … you name it, they have it.
 
Anyway, a number of years ago, I went to the store to get something for this particular friend for another occasion, I think it might have been for his 60th birthday party, and I bought him a classic Star Trek comic book. I think I might have bought some other things in there, too, but I don’t remember.
 
Well, with my friend in his present condition, I decided to go to the store again, and I quickly located something that I though he would like related to Star Trek. I put it under my arm and decided to look at other parts of the store, just for kicks.
 
I waffled through comic books and bubblegum cards and figurines of every description, and then I got to the part of the store that had old game—everything from games related to I Dream of Jeanie, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, even the Man From U.N.C.L.E., and then after looking at these games, my eyes caught something I never thought I would see in person ever again.
 
I saw a Dr, Nim game just sitting there, unopened, in plastic. It even had the Macy's price sticker still on the box.

I picked the game up. I could not believe what I was seeing--
 
But I put it right back down.
 
I was there to get something for my friend, not for me, and I made my one purchase, left the store, and decided that it was not time for a meeting of Dr, Nim and myself.
 
I went home, just trying to put the good doctor out of my mind, but I ended up talking about it with both my mother and my wife, and they both told me that I should got back to the store and buy the game.
 
It was reasonably priced compared to what I had seen it go for on the Internet, so with their tacit approval, I decided that I would go back to the store on the very next day, which is exactly what I did.
 
I kind of felt that it would be just my luck that someone else had seen it and purchased it, which I felt would serve me right for not buying it in the first place.
 
So I entered the store, went right to the game area, and lo and behold, my thoughts were correct, Dr, Nim had seemingly made a house call and was not there anymore.
 
I looked up and down the rows of games, but the good doctor was nowhere to be found. It was not where I had left it, and it appeared that it was not there anymore.
 
Someone else had the same memories as me, and had purchased the game while I was doing nothing but talking about it.
 
My darn luck!
 
But I looked at another row of games, and what did I see?
 
Dr, Nim, staring right at me, almost demanding that I purchase it right then and there.
 
Evidently, somebody else had picked it up, with the intent to buy it, decided not to, and did not return it to the exact place that I left it … but they did return it to the same area, so it was there, just in another place.
 
I grabbed Dr, Nim as if I was rescuing it from danger, out it under my arm, and made my way to the front of the store, purchased it, and brought it home in total glee.
 
The reunion was complete.
 
Dr, Nim would not complete this house call until the next day, because it ended up that Wednesday became an extremely busy day for me, because work contacted me, and they wanted me to cover a virtual conference, which took a good part of my day away with the write-up and all.
 
But yesterday, after I finished a busy morning of food shopping, I finally had time to play Dr, Nim.
 
I took the plastic wrapper off, opened up the box, and there it was as I had remembered it, a red slant board with white levers and 15 marbles.

 
The intricate instruction book was there, pages and pages about Dr, Nim and how to play it. There were also images on the inside game box that would be considered un-PC in today’s world, but this was 1966, and not 2021, so few cared about such images back then. I certainly didn’t.
 
Anyway, I set the game up the way that the instruction book told me to do, and after more than 50 years separated from this game, I was playing Dr, Nim again.
 
And yes, Dr. Nim still beat me.
 
But alas, I am now 63, and not nine years old, and I kind of figured out after a while how the game worked, and I beat Dr, Nim a few times myself, which I had totally forgotten that the instruction book said I could do from time to time.
 
But Dr, Nim did more than win games for me—the game still won over my heart all these years later, and let me tell you, it was money well spent.
 
Funny, my wife and mother and even my sister do not remember the game, but I saw my daughter yesterday--for the first time in about six months, due to COVID--when she came over to the house to visit my mother on her 90th birthday.
 
She saw the game resting in the room where I have all my records and this computer that I am typing on right now—which was her old bedroom—and she said to me, “I know all about Dr, Nim.”
 
She told me that Dr, Nim also resides at her mother’s house, and she has played it many times to while away the time.
 
So Dr, Nim does live on, totally unbeknownst to me, living on to the next generation in my family.
 
Honestly, I have never been so happy to see a doctor in my entire life.
 
Have a good weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.