Skip ahead two years and the claw has taken on a new meaning.
Someone introduced Ellie, our five year old, to an arcade game nobody had ever won before. It’s a large, glass case filled with Dollar Store toys, velcroed together and after inserting approximately $20 worth of change the player manipulates a joystick that controls a silver, metal claw. The claw drops towards the tethered down, garbage toys and usually catches on an impossible corner of the toy but never fully grips anything, before the claw releases, the player sighs and waves goodbye to the toy bin and their money. Except in Ellie’s case.
Ellie has never lost the claw game and asks about when she can play next, every second of every day.
The claw game is surprisingly not hard to find. Just when I think we’ve found a grocery, bix box or department store to run into quickly, we spot a claw game and the begging begins.
Ellie: Can I play the claw Mom?
As though I’m the parent of a future carney and my role in life is to nurture this early interest in her trade, I begin digging in my purse for loose twenties.
Most adults who pass by smile meekly and carry on but on occasion, they want to tell Ellie not to bother with the game because it’s a waste of her time and her parent’s money. Then she reaches into the metal flap and out comes her garbage toy. Her eyes fill with tears of joy and she practices flashing the toy from behind her back as she re-tells her strategy to anyone who will listen.
We are now the proud owners of $500 of a motley crew of the ugliest, cheapest, styrofoam and poly-bean blended toys ever produced and somewhere there’s a manufacturer of “the claw,” sitting inside his glass house, shaking his head in wonderment at the one kid in the world who has found a way to crack his code.
