I love dominoes. I really do. I love the colors, I love the sound they make when you shuffle them around and I love all the things you can do with dominoes. But most of all, I love the memories they bring back.
When I was a little boy, back on the farm, my brothers and I would spend entire weekends playing with dominoes. We would line them up all over the farm house. We would start in the living room, criss-cross the room around the furniture, near the TV, up the coffee table and down again, all the way through the hall and into the large kitchen where we had lots of room to make domino pyramids, domino steps, towers, dominoes that would rest next to a ball, dominoes lined up in shapes of triangles, flowers, houses, people to finally go into the dinning room, climb up a chair then unto the big 8 place dinning table where we would line up as many dominoes as we could.
Hours were spent in quasi silence just lining up all these little pieces with the discipline of Buddhist monks. Once in a while, we would look up from our labor to make sure our end of the line was in sync with what the brothers were doing.
Oh there were problems. The slightest vibration could set the whole thing in motion, which would in turn cause a screaming match and sometimes abandon. But for the most part we would just line them up again. No matter how many times they fell.
Once we ran out of dominoes, or whenever my mother got tired of seeing all these little rectangular shapes all over her house, the time would come to reap the fruits of our labour.
Like architects unveiling their greatest works, we would announce to the whole house that it was time to topple the dominoes. The entire family would gather to watch as one of us would flick the first piece and then we would all follow the trail as the pieces toppled one after the other. First in the living-room, all around the furniture, around the TV, through the hall into the large kitchen. The Robichaud's would follow the zipping sound of falling plastic into the dinning room to watch as the final piece came to rest.
It was always anticlimactic, but it was fun nonetheless. All we had left to do was start all over again.
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