Godzilla!

"Always believe something wonderful is happening, and will always continue to happen."

Bruce Van Horn

Maybe you have noticed this phenomenon. You wake up in the morning with a particular plan, or no plan, and what actually happens during that day is a whole lot different than what you thought was going to happen.

Take, for example, Mother’s Day, when our son John was about four years old. My wife’s family is from Chicago, and we were there visiting. It was over Mother’s Day weekend, so we planned to spend it with Liz’s family. As it turned out, the host family of the celebration got sick, and the rest of our merry group of twenty still wanted to have dinner together. Evening approached, and we scrambled for a place on the busiest restaurant day of the year, in the third busiest city in the country, before internet, Yelp, or OpenTable.

Somehow, we found Joe’s Crab Shack. Liz, John, and I were running pre-GPS late and were the last to arrive. I dropped Liz off at the front to find our family, in what was clearly a jam-packed restaurant. I swooped John up into my arms, and when I opened the front door of Joe’s, we were engulfed in the most extraordinarily loud music I have ever heard in any restaurant anywhere.

Through hand signals, we found our family in one of Joe’s many deafening rooms at a long table with bench seats on either side. Liz saved us a couple of seats at the far end.

We began the festivities with an initial period of yelling, “How’ve you been?” across the table at a nephew or two, and I can only assume they were yelling the same thing back at me.

Two of the many loudspeakers in the room were right above us at the end of our bench. During the briefest of moments between songs, I stood up on the bench, yanked the wires out, and turned back to our table. I felt the pride a mother bird must feel when she brings the worm back to the nest. My brood, faces uplifted, were making happy motions with their arms over the still-roaring wall of sound.

After some time, John grew a little restless, as a four-year-old is apt to do, so I took him for some noise relief back out Joe’s front door.

When we came back in, John noticed one of those clear-sided big box machines, filled with stuffed animals and a remote-controlled hook designed to peel stacks of quarters out of the pockets of unsuspecting children and adults.

We paused, looked, and began to insert quarters. Now, in all my life, I have never seen anyone win anything from those machines. But the thing that attracted John’s notice, and mine, was a singular “Godzilla” hand puppet, among all the other nondescript, fifty-cent stuffed animals. So, we fed in the quarters, as I realized there just might be a chance. You see, there was a tag connected to Godzilla by a round plastic hoop, and I figured if I could hook the hoop, I might come away with the prize.

So, we kept at it, and after a while it became a badge-of-honor kind of moment. Now, the men reading this know what I am talking about, and I kind of think the women are rolling their eyes. But a crowd had begun to form around us, mostly other men and boys from all over the restaurant, who I assume had also grown tired of yelling, “How’ve you been?” across the tables at their relatives.

This gave them something to cheer for and enjoy in this veritable ocean of sound experience. And cheer they did, or at least they looked like they were cheering. And the more they cheered, the more I wanted that Godzilla hand puppet, not just for me but for my boy, and for these men and boys around us, and for men and boys everywhere.

I was running out of quarters, but rather than leave my post, I was delighted to find that the men in the crowd started giving me their quarters… I’m not kidding!

And not more than twenty dollars’ worth of quarters later, I hooked my, I mean John’s, prize!

We still have it, ’cause after all, it’s not often you get to beat Godzilla at his own game, on Mother’s Day!

Click here to see your prize.

-Hank

"Godzilla!" from The Saturday Morning Post, at hankfrazee.com