For whom the ball rolls

So, last night my employer hosted a bowling party for us at the local lanes. And unlike the last time I was invited to a company-sponsored bowling party (i.e., what proved to be the last corporate shindig at The Company), this time my carpal tunnel wasn't encased in a brace. So I actually put on a pair of those funny-looking shoes and spent a couple of hours heaving an 8-pound ball in the general direction of a set of pins that were not nearly as cooperative as those pictured here. (I'd have gone for an even lighter ball if there had been one with holes big enough not to threaten to get stuck on my fingers and drag me down the lane too. Though I might've had a better chance of knocking the pins down if it had.)

I can't remember how long it's been since I last went bowling -- has to be at least 20 years -- but I'm pretty darned sure we were still keeping score on paper. (Live pinboys had, however, been replaced by automatic pinsetters.) Good job that it's all computerized now, because my aging brain cells have long since purged the memory of how to score spares and strikes. Not that scoring strikes would have been an issue for me, you understand; I'm not sure that I've ever gotten one in my excessively sporadic bowling experience, and I sure as heck didn't get one last night. To the astonishment of all (especially me), I did, however, manage three spares, with which I was quite content. In fact, the last spare would have been a strike had it only been my first ball of the frame instead of the followup to a resounding gutter ball. Timing is everything.

Speaking of gutter balls, I have to say that -- as welcome as automated scoring may be -- the concomitant cartoon displays to celebrate STRIKE!s and SPARE!s and, yes, GUTTER BALL!s get a bit tiresome after the fourth or fifth or thirtieth time they play. Especially the GUTTER BALL! announcements. I mean, c'mon, I know I just rolled a gutter ball. OK, two gutter balls in one frame. I don't need to have it advertised in technicolor for the entire clientele of the lanes to see. And as for the helpful little "sparefinder" displays after each first-ball-of-the-frame, pointing out where you should throw the ball to pick up that spare... well, shoot, even as rotten a bowler as I can deduce that I should aim at the single remaining pin rather than throwing it down the gutter. Duh. Of course, if I was actually capable of deliberately aiming the ball (instead of heaving it in the general direction), I'd be getting strikes instead gutter balls.

But all kidding aside, I had a blast. For some reason, bowling is the only physical activity that I actually enjoy despite my utterly wretched performance at the game. This goes all the way back to my freshman year in college (contrary to popular belief, bowling was not done with small round boulders even that long ago), when I managed to snag a spot in a bowling/badminton section (you got seven weeks of each) for one of my two semesters of mandatory physical education. The university couldn't boast ten-pin lanes, but they did have a nice set of candlepin lanes in the student union. If you're not familiar with candlepins (they seem to be peculiar to New England and the Canadian maritimes), they use these more or less cylindrical pins and a quite small ball (no finger holes -- you just hold it in your hand), with three balls per frame. I had a great time even though I ended up at the bottom of the class in terms of my cumulative score. And inexplicably, I got an A in bowling (the instructor said it was because I improved more than anyone else), which was a good thing because I flunked badminton, so I still got a C for the term and didn't have to suffer through another semester of PE.