Because I don’t get the opportunity to do so during the week, usually I sleep in on Sundays. This week was the exception. It has been a stressful couple of weeks, working, moving into a new place and dealing with, as many of you did, the aftermath of extreme weather during a lingering winter.
This weekend I thought I would treat myself a little and on Sunday I got up early, had my brunch and drove to Santa Rosa to catch a special preview of the new “Dungeons and Dragons” movie. Though the film doesn’t get a wide release until Friday, I bought my ticket to a matinee preview days in advance. I don’t often get hyped for movies, but I admit I have been hyped for this one.
The American poet Robert Frost wrote his short poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay” in which he muses about the transient nature of existence and the futile longing for things to remain the same. “Nature’s first green is gold/Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower/ But only so an hour. Nothing Gold Can Stay,” he wrote.
This concept cannot be applied to the game of “Dungeons and Dragons,” which celebrates 50 years next year, or to literary figures such as Batman or Sherlock Holmes, whose creators have long left our mortal world, but whose legacies linger for generations to enjoy. Indeed, a lot of the things we humans hold dear and which fill us with wonder, joy and/or nostalgia retain their lasting power through their persistence in our minds and in our hearts.
Such is the case for me with D&D. I have been playing the game on an off in some form or another since I was a boy. Although I am dating myself, I still own the first edition books I bought at Toys ‘R Us for $8 in the mid 80s and I can recall sitting around a big table outside my parents’ house in L.A. with my brother and my middle school friend Christian, playing the game for hours. When others walked by observing, my dad looked at the maps, the funny shaped dice and the colorful but strange looking game books and would say, “Don’t even ask about it, that’s the strangest game ever.”
My dad was a practicing physician in Nicaragua and my mom was an attorney, but like many immigrants who made their way to the U.S., they worked odd jobs and long hours to provide for their children’s needs and to keep food on the table.
I recall years later when my dad and my uncle spoke about starting their days at the crack of dawn, delivering newspapers and working other jobs, while the rest of us were sleeping comfortably. We’d wake up to play video games, watch sports and played games all day. My High School buddy George often says he would give up an arm if he could go back and relive his childhood. A sentiment a lot of us sometimes share, wishing we could hop on that Flux Capacitor-equipped Delorean and relive those halcyon days of youth. “Nothing gold can stay.”
I now have fond memories of playing D&D and “Magic the Gathering” with my nephews. Twenty-five years after I had first played the game, history repeated itself. I made my way back to the place “Where a kid can be a kid” and purchased the third edition D&D starter set and taught them how to play.
On another occasion, I recall discussing some of the issues of the day on social media once and when one of our readers who disagreed with an ideological stance I took saw my Transformers action figures pictured in the mantle behind me in the background, she tried to disparage me by saying, “Why don’t you go play with your little robots and toys?” The implication was clear: Somehow an adult cannot have a hobby, or carry that love for things which brough him joy when they were younger and still retain his credibility.
In some ways, I think that Frost was wrong. Although it is true that “So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day,” the transitory nature of the joy and the wonderment of childhood or days and/or people long gone, and the wistful longing for those things can be ameliorated by embracing the nostalgia.
So I donned my D&D t-shirt, grabbed a giant tub of popcorn and sat in the dark for two hours at the cinema. I was 13 years old again, transported to the days of rolling dice with Christian around the table, slaying the imaginary orcs goblins and beholders, and remembering the magical days of comic books, skateboarding, make belief and fun. Nothing gold can stay? Maybe, but we can try to hold on for as long as we can.
Ariel Carmona Jr. is a 19-year veteran of the journalism industry and the managing editor of the Lake County Record-Bee. You can follow him on Twitter @AOCarmona. “Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” opens in wide release in theaters on Friday.
