Kicking back with my family and a White Russian

My mother wrinkles her nose. "Blogging!" she says scornfully. "People used to have diaries. That were private."

When I kept my first blog I used to worry that my mother would find it. Now she knows my URL and she never looks at it. Never. I shouldn't have wasted the energy worrying.

I ask my brother, "What should I blog about?" "Bowling," he tells me. Listening to my brother is usually (though not always) a good idea, so bowling it is.

***

Almost the whole gang went bowling tonight: the seven cousins and six of the grownups. We laced up our two-tone shoes and picked out our balls. I don't think I'd been bowling since 1988 and I was surprised to see how things had changed, with displays over each lane that tell you whose turn it is and what your score is, along with gutter guards that pop up automatically when the little kids are at bat (so to speak) and slide back down when the grownups take their turns.

My family never bowled when I was growing up -- never once. I'd never picked up a bowling ball until we got to the bowling unit in sophomore year PE. I had this deep-seated aversion to the very idea of bowling, and my inner soundtrack ("No no no no no, no no no no," to the tune of "Da Doo Ron Ron") probably caused me to tune out what little instruction we were given in the mechanics of ball-hurling and pin-toppling.

I was really bad. (I should have taken my brother's tack: he used to try to get the lowest possible score. "Once I got a 7!" he said proudly. Since he was ten years behind me in school, I didn't have the benefit of his ideas at the time.) I expected to be really bad tonight. It turns out that one advantage of coming from a family of non-sports people is that you don't look nearly as stupid bowling as you did in tenth-grade PE. Or maybe you look just as stupid to an outsider, but there's much to be said for looking stupid all together.

Since I tell you all about it when our kids follow in our footsteps in things like math competitions, I should probably tell you that my boys bowl just like their mama did as a kid. The scores in our lane were pretty dismal, but we had a good time anyway. I almost broke 100, but not quite.

Maybe that's part of what it means to be a family: you can all be inept together and have fun anyway.

Comments

[Rob]

This sort of soul-baring honesty makes me feel as if, even though your words reach me from a computer a thousand miles away, you might be sitting in the next room.

[Angela]

Too bad you weren't in Beckley at an earlier age...you could have taken bowling lessons with me and Michelle :)

I would occasionally go bowling with my grad school friends when I first moved to Mo'town. I don't know that I've ever broken 100.

[JaneC]

I'm almost 26 years old, and I've never been bowling. My husband occasionally threatens to take me, but it hasn't happened yet.

I hope our kids follow in our footsteps, as language-and-history-loving musical types, but I try to mentally prepare myself for the idea that our children may be as different from us as we are from our parents (my father was an athlete and an accountant; I can't balance my checkbook without a calculator or throw a ball in a straight line). It's great that you have so much in common with your relations. I love my parents, and get along well with them, but we don't have many common interests.