It was a very quiet and chilly winter evening during the end of the first semester in my 7th grade. After finishing my swim practice I was freezing and was not having such a good day from sneezing and feeling like I was catching a cold. I found myself at home hearing beeping noises in my loft. I was very curious what it was so I decided to go upstairs. My father stopped me halfway through the stairs and told me to stay downstairs while finishing with what he was doing. At that point I realized a deal I had made with him before the school year started. The deal was that if I could pull off a good GPA he would get me a PS4 game console by the end of the first semester. Around 30 minutes later, he called me up. While I was walking up the stairs, I could hear the console running and the disk rolling around inside of it. I walked up slowly to the loft and as soon as I saw it I burst into excitement and started playing with it as soon as I got my hands on it.

Instead of my father disapproving of me playing the PS4 too much, every weekend he would even play with me. Although he still doesn‘t let me play on during the weekend, weekends would be the funniest and best moments ever with him since he always try to make time to play with me. While playing games together in the loft during the weekends, sometimes he would lose. When he would lose games against me he would get frustrated and would pick me up and throw me on the couch as a joke. Those moments in the loft are by far the funniest and my favorite parts of playing with my father. Recently, we wouldn’t be playing together in the loft as we would before. I would always be busy with swim meets and running errands. That is why this memory is locked in my heart because the moments of playing games with my father are probably going to be one of my favorite childhood memories. In the end, I hope my father and I start having more time to bond like before. It doesn’t even have to include games. It could be anything else that we could do together for fun. To me the PS4 is not just a game console; it will always be an important memory of the time I spent with my father.

<Evan Yoo Notre Dame High School 9th Grade>