Thank God for memories that make us laugh, even at the darkest moments in our lives. When family gathers for a memorial service or funeral someone always says, "OMG, remember the time we . . . "

My niece and nephew are twins--Kevin and Melanie. They are a few years younger than my daughter and are the closest she'll ever come to having a brother and sister. When all three were barely teenagers we began having sort of slumber parties at my house. Why anyone calls these over-nighters "slumber parties" is beyond any of us--no one sleeps. Anyway, this was back in the days of the original Atari video games. All three kids owned one and so they'd share games. Their favorites, I think, were: Q-bert, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Pitfall, and Circus Atari. At least, those were the ones played most. I was always astonished by those kids' ability to control those goofy games. My daughter, Katie, was so good with Q-bert I think she finally got bored with it. She, as with most kids of her generation was always moving on to something more challenging. I would sit and watch them play Raiders of the Lost Ark in utter amazement and say, "How the hell did you know to go there (or do that)?" Often she'd say, "Oh, Mindy showed me." Mindy was a Raiders genius. When they got tired of real challenges they'd take a break with Circus Atari because we'd always laugh hysterically over the noises the dying clowns made. Splat! Boing-oing-oing! Thud! and we'd talk about all the little dead clown bodies piling up behind the television. They were fiends for Pitfall and I can still hum the tune that went along with that one.

My favorite game, to the children's dismay, was Sub Scan. Stop laughing! I'd try to squeeze in there when they were eating some of the horrible-for-kids food I'd buy for the weekend, but they'd hear the . . . beep . . . . . . . beep . . . . . . . . beep . . . .poot (that was a depth charge) and collectively groan. When they were done groaning they'd make fun of me. Children are such brats when they realize they're electronically smarter than adults.

My brother was addicted to Millipede. He finally got so frustrated at not being able to get to a certain level that he took a hammer and smashed the damn game. I'm not kidding! Of course he was terribly sorry afterwards and so were the rest of us when we discovered they'd stopped making the game and it couldn't be replaced. (Why do companies do that? They take the best crap off the market: California Onion salad dressing, Vanilla Orchid nail polish . . . the list goes on and on!) My husband during these weekends of childish over-indulgence was usually up in his laboratory working on some fiendish method for destroying Republicans; he'd never participate in any of our games; he hated competition and child racket.

When the children weren't stuffing their faces with tacos, chocolate, and Coke (a-Cola) or playing Atari they would invent the cutest little games--or at least Melanie would invent little games. Melanie and Kevin and Katie grew into responsible, kind, loving adults, but when they were kids . . .well, Melanie in particular had the most bizarre imagination. We'd just be sitting there and she'd say, "What would you do if I started walking on the ceiling?" One of Melanie's little games was something she called Lunatic Ledge. Melanie had many Barbie and Barbie-type dolls and usually she'd play with them the way any other little girl plays with dolls, but one weekend she decided to create little dramas between and among these dolls. Our stairway leading upstairs had a woodwork semi-wall so that you couldn't see the stairs, but the paneling didn't go all the way to the ceiling. The top of that wall was Melanie's Ledge. She'd go about halfway up the stairs with a couple of her dolls, put them on the ledge and then the dolls would carry on a dramatic conversation until one of them would either jump or was pushed off the ledge. (Hey! We never harmed ourselves, others or animals!)

But the Lunatic Ledge adventure that sticks in all our minds was the time that during the performance by these dolls one of the heads fell off, which was funny on its own, but before it could hit the ground, my cat Pete came out of nowhere, caught the head and ran away with it. Twenty years later and we still laugh about that one.

Today is Kevin and Melanie's birthday. Melanie will be with us, but Kevin lives in Delaware with his lovely wife Jami and their kitties. I'll send him a copy of this; he could have no doubt done a funnier job of writing about the Lunatic Ledge and of how boring it was to watch me play Sub Scan, but I got here first.

Happy Birthday you two!