Uh, I went bowling yesterday. I didn’t actually set out to do this, as usually, I’m pretty happy to sit around reading or pickin’ a banjo. Here’s how it happened:
Seems that during a charity auction, Laura’s company, Your Great Event, bought a “bowling party” at a place called Jillian’s, at Universal City’s City Walk. She invited a number of her clients to come along with her and members of her office team. And she invited me.
So after work, I drove over to Jillian’s. Now, City Walk is located right off the Cahuenga Pass, which contains the Hollywood Bowl on one side and Universal Studios on the other.
That’s spectacularly inauspicious, considering that this is the site of the final battle between the Californios and the Mexican Army during the California revolt in 1845.
Laura, of course, always does things right, so she had snacks laid on – buffalo wings, along with chips and salsa. Want beer? Fine, the bar was both adjacent and open.
Anyway, we bowled. “No problem,” I thought, “I know how to do this.” At least I used to. Harvey (who died an early death last month, the victim of cancer) and J.B. Duryee, brothers with whom I grew up back on Rancho Cascabel, out in the Mojave Desert, and I used to trek into Lancaster to bowl. We took Dennis Siroki, a neighbor kid who was a pal, along with us. Back then, strikes and spares were no problem. Getting a date was a problem, but bowling? No problem at all.
But this time, strikes and spares were extinct. I have flat forgotten how to bowl. Forgotten the hold, the stance, the approach, the swing and the release. What I remember today are sore muscles and a worn-out thumb.
Laura, of course, was typical Laura. The more she worked at it, the better she got, and the better she got, the more energetic and competitive she became. We need to bottle her energy. Sell it. Get rich.
At the end of our time at Jillian’s, I was remembering that Harvey, J.B., Dennis and I all used to bowl in the mid-200s, that we used to think in terms of perfect-score 300-point games.
More poignantly, I also was remembering the last time I bowled. It was the night before returning to boarding school for a new school year. Against his better judgment, my father had granted me use of the family’s ’57 Oldsmobile 88 for the occasion, and while hooning around with the Duryees and Siroki, I managed to smoke its transmission. I don’t remember how I got back to Newbury Park Academy the next day for the agony of the new school year, but it wasn’t in that Oldsmobile.
I’d kind of like to own that Olds today, though at the price of gas these days, it would be about as useful as a useable set of bowling skills – or, for that matter, a set of banjo skills.
All things considered, I’m just better off with a banjo, or a book, in my paws. I think I’ll leave bowling stored safely in my memory, where it belongs.
- JFT