Every summer while I was growing up, my parents took me to the Jersey shore, where I'd plug quarter after quarter into pinball machines. As a teenager attempting to evade Mom and Dad's sometimes overbearing attention, I'd bike to the local arcade and slam the same games. Even into my 30s, whenever I'd visit my folks, I'd drive to a nearby juke joint and shoot a few pins for old times' sake. But when I became an orphan this year at age 42, I also became an adult. I stopped playing pinball for good.
My mom died more than a...
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