“Kids five and up get in free the first Sunday of the month,” Matt said. We were at Barcade in downtown New Haven, across from Elm City Games, for a date night in late February. Matt was my neighbor in the suburbs, a former bassist in his late 40’s, with agate ear plugs from his band days.

“That’s so awesome,” I told Matt. “Free childcare.” Matt and I were taking turns playing a shooting game, while our spouses played Pac-man nearby, the stench of popcorn and grease between us. I didn’t play video games usually. I was along for the ride, pretending to fit in, while Matt moved his controller up and down and sideways, tapping at a shooting button for explosives.

Growing up, my father loved arcades almost as much as he enjoyed gambling on sports. He used to poke fun at how bad I was compared to him. It was true: I lacked my father’s laser focus when it came to gambling. He used to slide one token after the other into the eyelets of the machine to kill time with my sister and me on a Sunday.

When we were 11 and 13, he moved to Ocean City, New Jersey—three hours from where we lived in Lancaster. We visited him every other weekend, spending Sundays at the boardwalk arcade, in dark rooms, buying tokens in cash, playing more games than we could count. Afterward, we drove back to Lancaster, where there was dinner at six and homework to finish. Where we weren’t allowed to play video games or watch R-rated movies.

My husband Jared, like our neighbor Matt, grew up in the countryside. Matt in rural Vermont, Jared in Waterville, New York, north of Utica. They’d both grown up riding dirt bikes to the point of near-death experiences. Cavalier youth, adrenaline junkies–the way of teenaged boys. Dirt roads in the scintillating sunlight, near crashes, the cold crisp breeze of early spring, a breath of air in the summer heat. The kind of thing some people never grew out of.

Like my dad, who relished his post-divorce life in proximity to Atlantic City. He used to stop at gas station pay phones to make calls to his bookies. As a kid, it seemed necessary, getting gas, some Swedish fish and the road, a few phone calls. But sometimes he ended the calls furious, other times euphoric—a sudden whir of generosity: stuffed animals or sweets, an extra string of raffle tickets for boardwalk rides later. Usually, after we crossed the Ninth Street Bridge, we had pizza at Mac ‘n Manco’s, with a large pitcher of Birch Beer. We liked the Tilt ‘a Whirl best, all three of us. My dad liked to drop money on the guy who made him guess his age—my father who was in his forties, but he looked twenty years younger—because he dressed that way, was tall and thin in Bruce Springsteen style jeans, with curly, wild hair, who left the top buttons of his Hawaiian shirt undone while we handed over our raffle tickets for more rides.

When a parent dies young, especially your father, they say it’s like losing a moral compass. But my answer to that is: what if the compass was backwards to begin with?

Nothing more fun than this—I had always thought as a child—a weekend with dad at the beach, without rules, only games and more games. Saturdays we often woke up to him already gone—slipped away in his Bermuda swim trunks to play volleyball on the ocean front, off first street. “You’ll know where to find me,” he always said, when we were kids. He left a twenty-dollar bill on the table for me to buy Entenmann’s donuts from the corner deli, saving enough change for cheese fries from the beach stand for lunch. We used to lounge by the volleyball court, sunburned while my father played, and played more games, drinking from his red Igloo cooler filled with ice, careful to leave enough for him when he took breaks. If we were lucky, he’d take us to ride the waves between games; play shark with us on his back under the riptide, this thrill that kept us wanting more, hoping for more.