The Lonely Tetrahedron

I’ve been shellacked by my day job and parental responsibilities over the last few weeks, so updates of any kind have been sparse. For this, I apologize. The day job can’t go away because it’s necessary for care and feeding of the beard. As for my children… well… they’ll always come first.

I was reading a friend’s post today on The Friendface that had a picture of his first die. When I read it, a flood of memories came back to me, and with them, not a few tears.

I have a special leather bag containing the second set of dice I got (originals from my first RPG ever, the Frank Mentzer Red Box), and the luckiest set of dice I’ve ever owned. Of my first set, I only have one left. It sits unused in the bottom of the dice box that my wife made me a couple Christmases ago, along with all of the other mismatched dice. It and its mates were the earliest form of see-through dice, and the first time I rolled them was at my Grandparents’ old house, upstairs on the old carpet, one summer many, many years ago.

My dad bought those dice for me. He’d never heard of Dungeons & Dragons, and I can’t picture anyone he associated with knowing anything about it either. The Internet as we know it today was science-fiction at that point in history, so with no way to Google what the hell this thing was that his son was into, he must have looked for days, if not weeks for those dice. There was only one gaming store in our entire city at that time, tucked away on Ellice Avenue in downtown Winnipeg. All he knew was that his little boy loved playing this new game, and he couldn’t play it without a special set of dice.

That last die of my first set is the 4-sided one, the one I that I hated to use because, as a lad of 10, I found it confusing.

Today I look at that beat up, blue little tetrahedron and cry. It’s the last vestige of a childhood gift given me by a man no longer here.

Like it, I am growing older.

Like it, I am steadily losing every person who had a hand in forming all of my earliest memories.

I think I’m going to give that lonely little tetrahedron a place of honour in that special leather bag.

Doc