Three years ago. (Two and a half years before getting the magic food cart.)

  Sleeping in on Saturday morning meant a lot more when Monday through Friday the alarm had a voice. The alarm has been muted for over two weeks, but it was still hard to wrap myself around retirement. My mind still expected to get up and go to work. My aching body still expected six am coffee, and a blueberry muffin from the cart near the office.

  The studio I worked at for the last 20 years was recently purchased by Largehard Arts or LA as they are known. All of our titles were made Y-pass exclusives. Bob, the former CEO of NeOrigami studios retired with a check that had numbers in front of the word billion. The senior staff, all 5 of us, all received a large, eight figure payout. Kevin the intern was quickly promoted up to senior staff. Bob said if they wanted us they were going to pay through the nose. Largehard Arts definitely paid.

  Our previous game had a similar concept to one of their mega budget “experiences.” As Yennifer Pate Joirnessen, the CEO of LA, liked to call their titles. She refused to call such “works of art” a mere game. Well our “mere game” outsold theirs to an embarrassing extreme.

  The most common meme was to take a clip of our character realistically performing an action, and put it side by side with the main character of LA’s last masterpiece bumbling around trying to do the same. I think it was the ladder clip that really fermented YPJ’s plan to buy out and then crush our little six person game studio. Once the studio was hers, she dissolved it. With prejudice.

  It’s odd for an indie studio to last 20 years. Shame ours didn't last 21. But we all got a golden parachute and a noncompete. My days of designing levels and concept art for video games were done. Because LA had a film studio, going back to do concept art for film and special effects was off the table too. Unless, YPJ decided to rehire any of us. I doubt she wanted any reminder of the embarrassment we caused, or the stinking large check she had to write to make us disappear.

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  So, I was home, lying in bed, on a Saturday. Getting out of bed can be a large hurdle when you have nothing to do outside of it. Ann was never like that. Every weekend she had a project or 10 and every second not spent working on them was a tragedy to her. She loved working in the backyard garden. She transformed our little suburban yard into something that rivaled the city’s botanical gardens. I’ve tried to keep them in shape since she passed five years ago, but crunch time for the latest title and my black thumbs meant they were a ghost of what they used to be. Fitting.

  Emotions that I used to work to avoid hit me hard. The next few months passed by in a montage of grey overcast skies, and a grey overcast me. I was a sad wealthy man, and I was pining for the days when we were broke and happy.

  Then my Neice’s daughter showed up at my door. My Grand Niece. How was I that old?

  Somehow that toddler Erin was now 19 and had just been accepted to the local culinary school. I had agreed to let her stay in the spare room because I thought I was helping her. She agreed to move in because she thought she was helping me, and because apartments in this city are criminally overpriced.

  My days got a little brighter. Erin would come home evenings and practice recipes and skills they taught at Culinary school. She decided I needed a hobby so she asked if she could teach me what they learned in class that day. She said something about teaching others is the best way to make the information stick. I think she was just trying to keep me from binging NetWarner all day.

  When we bought the house, Ann insisted on a large kitchen with two of nearly everything. We installed twin ovens, an island with two prep stations and eight stovetop burners. I cashed my bonus check from Eagles Fury 3 and we splurged on a restaurant style walk-in freezer.

  Ann loved to cook. I loved just being around Ann, so we cooked together.

  However nothing we made was as fancy as what Erin was teaching me. How to make a perfect Hollendase, baking souffle, blowing sugar into sculptures. My kitchen became a gallery of culinary art created by Erin, and a landfill of burnt atrocities of food from me.

  It was wonderful. But like all good things over too soon.