Part 1
WARNING - LONG POST!
My wife and definitely my better half wrote a rather unique tribute to the Musketeers and secondarily to this thing we do, the game(s) we play and the relationships we create. This is the view, or can be the view of the AH Widows. I thank her for her patience and I bless the day I met her. May we have an even longer run together.
The Musketeers 20th Anniversary
A Love Letter
(c)Sharyn Pierot 2/2010
One night, recently, as my sixteen-year-old son with two of his friends played Aces High together online, my world flipped over and in an instant, changed. His friends had wanted to try out Aces High, after hearing my son (aka Gaz) talk about it. They met together in an arena to do some practice warm-ups and try out different planes, bombs and ammunition.
As I heard him talking to his friends, I stopped the DVD and stilled my hands from their needlework. I sat listening.
My son talked more than I’d heard him talk before on the game. Usually silent or monosyllabic, he was now the guide. I listened as he gave out information about planes and the kinds of ammo they each carried, about which were fast flyers, bombers, and easy to maneuver. He knew what he was talking about. He sounded like his father. He sounded like the one you know as Rapier.
I am not a gamer of anything. Monopoly and Uno stretch my nerves, Lego’s confuse my senses. Yet, I’ve reluctantly joined in, when called upon to be a player, for the sake of my son. I draw my line at computer and console games, though. I’ve tried. My mind can’t hold them. That is his father’s world.
I am a mother. I’m concerned about my son’s present and future. I am not unique. Mothers worry about how their sons will fare in the world. There are good and dangerous turns. People who help and harm. Good times and not so good times. There is economic flux, global warming, unpredictability of life, and surety of death. War is a constant.
I want to pack my son a bag with sandwiches, an apple, cookie, and a cool drink, that will sustain him, whatever he happens to run into. Wherever he goes, my instinct is to hover. I know I can’t save him. I cannot protect him from his future. I can’t even shield him when he walks out the door every day. I want to tell him what to expect, and prepare him for everything unseen and unknown. I wish to give him all my good information and have him remember it.
I can’t and he won’t.
Our family does not have a village, community, or even a neighborhood. There are no grandfathers to tell stories. No uncles to hang out with. Whether I like it or not, my son will rip himself from my arms without the assistance of a family tribe to care for him.
Despite this, a warrior-tribe exists.
I married into this squad of The Musketeers, nearly nineteen years ago. Our son was born into it. Rapier, in fact, was informed of the pregnancy while at an Air Warrior convention in 1992. I called him around four a.m. after a very excited positive plus on the pregnancy test. He was bleary-voiced and just getting into bed. He had to call later that day to confirm our conversation wasn’t a dream!
With our computer in the bedroom during those early years, our son and I would nurse in the rocking chair throughout the late night hours, while his dad typed out conversations on his keyboard, and wrestled with an intricate server system that connected him to real people. As we rocked, I watched as little “T’s” would swirl around the tiny computer screen, totally engrossing my husband’s attention. He was flying with people all over the world. It was astounding!
As a toddler, curled into the middle of our family bed, our son and I snuggled close, while his dad tried out a new microphone-headset system to speak to his squad mates and the other players. Now voice was added to the clicking of the keys. A one-sided staccato of phrases, commands and guidance I didn’t understand. Technology was moving The Musketeers community up close and personal. Together, our son and I would fall asleep as rendezvous and mission plans were calculated to garner the most points and kills.
As a young and growing boy, his father’s voice floated up the stairwell and into his room, soothing him to sleep with lullabies of soliloquy of one-sided conversations, plans, and missions.
An invisible team structure, an unseen community of men, was forming a tribe, which life, time, and wives would not break. My son heard a monologue of The Musketeers, in a tribal-squad of warrior-hunters carrying on the innate and instinctive man-ritual of their personal heroes and the men that came before them. As he drifted to sleep on weekend nights, his father’s voice was there, speaking with his squad mates-tribesmen, perfecting their skills, forming and maintaining this community, which included and was beyond individual personality. I imagined my son, as a Native American boy-child, who lying in his tent, picked out his father’s voice and followed it while in conversation with the men’s village council.
I will admit I was not always happy with the obvious anticipation of my husband going off to his computer. I felt left out and alone. I knew for sure, I wasn’t as much fun as the pleasure and experience of the game he had with his buddies. Rapier was definitely more animated, carefree and jovial, while playing with The Musketeers, than he was with me. I was jealous. I silently, and not so silently, seethed.
I didn’t get it.
