Warning: Do Not Play The Game Unless You Intend To Finish!

Just when you think television is an utter wasteland, it throws you a curveball. To wit, Sunday night's episode of Once Upon A Time. In order to defeat Peter Pan who had found and used the curse that the evil queen Regina had originally used to banish all the fairytale characters (Snow White, Red Riding Hood, and the like) from their world to our world where SHE would be in charge and have her “happy ending”, Rumpelstiltskin sacrifices himself to kill Pan – who's nastier than his James M. Barrie created counterpart, but not by much – and Regina saves the fairytale characters again from the curse with her magic.

The price? (For there's always a price with magic.) Her adopted son Henry and his biological mom Emma who saved the town from the curse in the first place wouldn't remember a thing about Storybrooke, the fictional town in what's supposed to be our world created by the curse, and apparently none of the people in Storybrooke would remember being there either … because they would have never been there. It's for TV like this I keep tuning in, and I'll have to wait until March to find out!

Today's title comes from what I remember of the 1995 film Jumanji, the title referring to a board game than manifests itself as you play in the environment around and on you as vast dangerous jungle. This being what was on the board that the players central to the story didn't read first – the girl playing freaked out at the first sight of a jungle animal and ran away – so decades later within the movie a brother and sister begin to play the game.

Turns out they need the others, now adults, to finish it and restore everything to what it was. And by everything we mean (say this in Mike Myers' Cat in the Hat voice, “EVERYTHING?”) everything; Alan Parrish played as an adult by Robin Williams never started playing Jumanji with his friend who in this new timeline became his wife, and Kirsten Dunst as a kid with her brother never got wrapped up in the game, and so there's potential to change a few things. Because you don't know of them happening any other way.

My other example of that – the entirety of Star Trek: The Next Generation's series finale “All Good Things . . . ” essentially having not happened (along with twenty-five years of “anti-time” history) because the phenomenon the Enterprise investigated in the present time of the episode was caused-slash-will be caused by the destruction of another ship – will take a whole other entry. So let's get down to brass tacks, what's been going on in my young life? Got to work this morning after my wife and I both went to a diabetes education appointment after I dropped the kids off at school.

Maybe having Martha there made both that session with Kayla the dietitian and Monday's session with JeNeil the educator seem less like an interrogation – but after last week's episode I don't want to take chances with my blood sugar. Last night after work, and THERE I've had several people check in on me from the building my employer rents where I work from, I drove to church where Jeffrey's Cub Scout troop had its annual Christmas party.

They got to exchange gifts, induct four Bobcats who weren't able to make the last monthly den meeting, and also get their wood blocks, wheels, and axles to prepare their cars for next month's Pinewood Derby. And here I must confess, that although I got the award for Best Craftsmanship when I was a Cub Scout and had that Derby the one year I was in Scouts, I barely worked on it myself. My dad deserves the credit for that.

Don't worry, Jeffrey's experience will not be a repeat of mine. (My dad's been dead seven years anyway.) And since the gift Sarah got in the exchange was a Walmart gift card as opposed to an actual physical toy, she was miffed that she didn't have something to play with. Against my better judgment – amazing how that hits you after the fact – we went to our local Walmart and she picked out a baby doll that used up the full fifteen dollars. (And picked up some speakers to plug into our laptop that we do need, I admit.) Then ate, I should say picked up some food, and went home.

Went home late – the kids didn't get to bed until shortly after ten! And I can still hear the cadence in Mrs. Stanmier my second grade teacher's voice when I admitted I got to stay up until ten to watch a particular television show: “Ten o'clock is way too late for a second grader to stay up at night!” But we're still getting this parenting thing, trust me. (A bit ironic saying that, considering how I started out this piece, with a monologue on some TV that touched me …) And now tonight to another Sunday School program at church, and looking forward to it!

David