My Dad took me to the Far Rockaway Boardwalk.  I’m guessing I was 10 or 11 years old. He knew I loved to ride the Bumper Cars.  Just before the ride started you were told not to bang into any of the other cars.  Yeah, right?  The best part of the ride was to bang into another car and laugh and laugh and laugh.  I just loved the Bumper Cars.  We walked around the Boardwalk a bit and found a game where you pitched a dime onto a flat shiny surface that had colored circles all over it.  The idea was to get your dime to land fully inside a circle.  Since the surface was very slippery, this simple concept was not so easy to achieve.  After pitching about ten coins (my Dad was generous), I decided to try a new technique.  I threw the coin high in the air (so, it wouldn’t slide so quickly into the gutter off the table.  By golly, it worked.  I jumped up and down and yelled and screamed that my coin landed inside one of the circles.  The guy who ran the game rang a loud bell and then grabbed the largest stuffed animal I had ever seen.  I must have been twenty feet tall (well, not really but it sure seemed that way).  I put it in the backseat and we drove home to Long Beach. My Dad and I had a really happy moment together.  I’ll always cherish this memory.