Toronto Thumbs

An Unexpected Gift
Pac-Man Beer Glass

Although there’s a post office right across the street from my home, I often neglect picking up packages until I get multiple reminders from Canada Post about them. Today I received a phone call from my father-in-law, Don, who asked if I had received anything from him recently. We spoke for a while and I realized that I probably just hadn’t gotten around to picking up the care package yet.

After retrieving the package, I rushed home and opened it before calling him back. The box had two items in it. One was a novelty Frankenstein pen with spring-loaded punching action and light-up LED eyes; the other was the Pac-Man beer glass pictured above.

Don gave me a little bit of history about the glass. He bought as part of a set, on clearance, from a K-Mart in 1982. Over the last 27 years, the other glasses must have gotten lost or were broken. This single glass is all that remains of that set, and I remember drinking a draught beer from it years ago when visiting him and my mother-in-law in their Louisiana home. The glass, along with a few others of random design, had shared a somewhat permanent home in the storage compartment of Don’s keg fridge.

As it turns out, they remembered me commenting on how cool the glass was, and thought it would make a meaningful gift to me. They were right. Pac-Man was one of the first video games I had ever played and from an early age I was enamoured with the character. I had the board game, colouring books, clothing, and even ate the breakfast cereal. Interestingly, I still have my Pac-Man tabletop arcade game and I keep it in my living room right next to the television. It still works.

I thanked Don for the gift and let him know how much it meant to me, and he commented that after all these years, he only realized that the design was of Pac-Man chasing ghosts when he was wrapping up the gift for its long journey north. We both joked about how gruesome the art is when you think about it. The ghosts are absolutely terrified whereas Pac-Man is decidedly nonchalant about the whole thing. It makes me wonder what the narrative of the game might have been if it was released in an age where video games had the inferiority complex they do now. But this is a topic for another article.

I’m not sure I’ll drink from this glass again, as I don’t want to chance having it break, but I will keep it proudly displayed as part of my collection of miscellaneous stuff.

Thanks again, Don.

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