My dad looked genuinely happy to see me. I could see it in his eyes. He was happy to see me step off the elevator, happy to have the plump desk clerk realize that I was his son. And I was happy to see him so happy. Because it hasn’t always been this way.

We ate breakfast together at a nearby Denny’s. I can probably count on one hand the number of times my dad and I have had breakfast together in my lifetime. I’ve enjoyed every single one of those breakfasts.

It’s the way he talks to me during these breakfasts that I love. He talks to me like an equal. In some moments, he seems almost deferential. “Well, you’ve seen a lot of things that I’ll never see,” he says. “You’ve been to places that I’ll never visit in my lifetime.” His big dream these days is to drive a recreational vehicle across North America, from the east coast to the west. He wants very much to see the Grand Canyon.

I encourage him. I egg him on. “Come on, dad. Go for it! What are you waiting for?” I say.

He says he doesn’t feel so good these days. He’s diabetic, and managing his blood-sugar levels is a fulltime job for him. He talks a lot about what he can’t eat anymore. He tells me that he makes a wine cooler for himself at night, mixing jug wine with ginger ale, because he saw a TV program that said a little bit of wine was good for his heart. This is the same man who once loved beer and beef jerky.

Sitting across from me in the bright morning light of the Denny’s, he seems small and frail. “It’s all part of the aging process,” he says, his favorite phrase these days, a phrase that I interpret as, I’m tired of having my body fail on a regular basis.

I know for a fact that my mother doesn’t want any part of his cross country trip/Grand Canyon experience. She has no desire to see it, or any of the other things my father wants to see along the way. She doesn’t want to be cooped up in a camper with him for weeks on end. I don’t blame her. She’s been putting up with him since 1967.

So I say this to him: “I’ll go with you. We can do a cross country trip together. You and me. What do you say?” And I mean it. I think it would be great to do this with my father. It would be something we would never forget. It would be hell, yes, but it would be terrific, too.

“We’ll see,” he says almost sheepishly. But I can tell that he doesn’t mind the idea. That he likes having someone get excited about his ideas for a change.

When the bill comes, I snatch it off the table, and pay it directly. He likes this, too–I can tell. He likes that there’s no ambiguity it. I’m paying, that’s that.

The cashier is an old woman who looks like she put her wig on backwards that morning. My dad doesn’t discriminate. He flirts with her anyway. Then the two of us head out to the parking lot and climb into his Kia.

Today it’s level 4-4 that stands in front of me. Time, once again, for another showdown with Donkey Kong, and another one of his levels which he has designed specifically to kill me. He’s in his usual perch, next to Pauline, in the top lefthand corner of the screen. He’s tossing springs, exactly as I’ve seen him do before. The twist, this time, is that there’s a smaller Kong–could it be Donkey Kong Jr.?–in a small box just below D.K. and Pauline. This Kong, which is wearing a weird bib, is standing next to a lever, which he pulls ever 15 seconds or so. When the lever is to the right, a bridge is extended between D.K. and a small platform on the right. When the lever is to the left, the bridge retracts.

In between lever pulls, the little Kong? He dances. He preens.

Now, whether the bridge is extended or not impacts the path of the thrown springs. With the bridge extended, the spring takes one extra bounce before plummeting to the jungle floor below; with the bridge retracted, the spring takes one less bounce before falling. The key to this level is to constantly gauge the state of the bridge so I know where I can–and can’t–stand.

All told, this level is fairly straightforward and, dare I say it, limited. I sacrificed a few Marios, not because of any sort of challenge, but because I was behaving carelessly. I suppose with 101 levels to create, the level designers couldn’t exactly pour their entire souls into every level. The most memorable thing about this level, of course, is the Donkey Kong Jr. cameo. Here’s hoping we see more of the little, preening bastard in levels to come.

Final numbers for this stretch of the game:

4-1: 137 seconds

4-2: 90 seconds

4-3: 71 seconds

4-4: 165 seconds

Total: 463 seconds. Number of Marios in the Mario Tank: 33. One more thing: Donkey Kong Jr. makes an appearance in the post-section cutscene. Looks like I will be seeing him again.