My mom used to give me a dollar to go and buy a loaf of Italian bread at Fazio's. I got to keep 25 cents.

It was the early 80s, I guess. And when she was between shopping trips but the family needed bread, my mom would send me to the grocery store on my bike.

This bread was always Italian bread, mind you. Sliced with seeds from Fazio's, where she did most of our shopping. I don't have a drop of Italian blood in me that I know of, but that's virtually the only kind of bread we ever ate.

Anyway, the store was, I don't know, maybe a 5-minute bike ride from home if I hurried? No more than 10 minutes, for sure.

Once I got there, I would enter, take a right and cut through one of the cashier lines, then another right followed by a left to get to the bakery. I would order the bread, which would be placed in a see-through plastic Fazio's bread bag and handed over to me.

I would take the bread, get into a 12-items-or-less line, and pay for it using the crisp dollar bill Mom had likely gotten from the bank when she cashed Dad's last paycheck. The bread cost 75 cents. That left me with a quarter, and that quarter never made it home.

I would always insert it into the video game stationed at the store entrance. The game changed a few times over the years, but the one with the longest tenure that I can remember was Defender.

I loved Defender. I once wrote an article for a middle-school English class on how to succeed at the game. Mrs. Crow gave me an 'A' on it, God bless her.

I would stand there playing Defender for however long I could hold out before losing my allotted three ships. If I had done well enough (which occasionally happened), I would enter my initials into the game as one of the high scorers.

Then I would grab the bread, go outside, get back onto my bike, and ride home.

The whole process rarely took more than 45 minutes.

I would pay a large sum of money for the chance to go back and do it once more.

It was a simpler time, you understand.