Declan decided we were doing Jack London Square on a Sunday, and I want to say for the record that I had a feeling. Not a bad feeling, exactly. More like the feeling you get when you leave the house in a jacket at 54 degrees and you already know you're going to be carrying it by noon. You go anyway. The jacket is already in your hand.
He had read something online — one of those posts treated with the kind of sincere, mock-serious reverence people usually reserve for ancient prophecy — about the new Dave & Buster's at 55 Harrison. It opened May 4th. He mentioned this fact four times before we got in the car, each time with slightly more authority, as though the date were a credential.
"It's brand new," he said.
"You said."
"Like, historically new."
I did not ask him to define historically.
The drive over was fine. Oakland was doing its thing — waterfront reinvention, everybody squinting into the mid-morning sun, the kind of cool bright light that makes the bay look like a poster of itself. Declan had his jacket off before we hit the parking structure. I kept mine on out of principle.
The moment we walked in, I watched something happen to him. It was not subtle. It was the face of a man who has returned to a version of himself that never fully left — specifically, the version that is twelve years old and has twenty dollars in tokens and zero concept of diminishing returns.
He made a plan. I'm using that word loosely. The plan was that we would "start casual, just see what's here," and then escalate "strategically." He said strategically. He was already holding a game card before he finished the sentence.
Forty-five minutes later I was sitting at a high-top with a basket of fries, watching Declan attempt to win a giant stuffed animal from a claw machine with the focus of someone defusing a bomb. He had explained the machine's internal logic to me twice. He had a theory about the claw's grip calibration. He said, at one point, "I've done the math on this," which, given that we were at a Dave & Buster's, was genuinely impressive as a sentence to say out loud.
He did not win the stuffed animal.
He won a smaller stuffed animal. A very small one. He held it up.
"Technically a win," he said.
I told him it was a frog.
"It could be a lot of things," he said.
We stayed another hour because he found a racing game and then, crucially, a guy at the next machine who also found the racing game, and they had one of those wordless male competitions that neither of them would acknowledge was a competition. Declan came in second. He said the controls were "a little off." The other guy left without comment. This felt important to Declan in a way I chose not to examine.
By the time we got outside, the sun had done its East Bay thing — full warm afternoon light, jacket irrelevant, bay looking genuinely beautiful in the way it sometimes does when you weren't expecting it to bother. We walked along the waterfront for a bit. He was carrying the frog.
He had already found something on his phone about an "Art of Kindness" installation nearby. He said we should go. He said it with the exact same certainty he'd had about the claw machine's internal logic.
"Do you actually want to see an art installation," I said, "or do you want to feel like we did something cultured after forty-five minutes of arcade games."
He thought about this.
"Both," he said. "Both is the correct answer."
It was, honestly. The frog was named by the time we got home. I don't want to say what he named it because it will only encourage him. I will say that he made it a little bed out of a folded dish towel and appeared satisfied with this as an outcome for the afternoon.
I've been thinking about it as a very Oakland kind of day. Something new opening, somebody deciding it's exciting and corny at the same time, everybody just trying to figure out if the vibe is worth it.
It was worth it. The frog is on the windowsill. Declan is already looking up the next thing.