Greetings!
Please tell me your bowling stories.
Here’s mine: the shoes give me the willies.
Also…
It’s the ’90s. I do a birthday party for a gaggle of 8 year olds…bowling and lunch. When it’s over and parents come for the kids, the kids head to where I’m sitting, where I’m (perhaps too enthusiastically) waving goodbye, and ask for their loot bags. Loot bags? What’s a loot bag? The last kids’ birthday party that I was at, I was the 8 year old …and that was when kids were allowed to run around blind-folded armed pins, looking for donkey’s rear ends and went home with nothing but stomach aches from too much Betty Crocker icing.
It’s the ’70s. And possibly the only time I actually bowled. I vaguely remember someone named Arnold wearing plaid pants and how there was melted orange cheese on the food and how knocking over pins was taken way too seriously. All to a backdrop of KC and the Sunshine Band or similar. I’ve blocked most everything else out. Was there more? Oh, yes, the shoes…
p.s. I’m not actually bowling.
But if I were, it would be in Campbellford, and here’s why.
♦
Other (not always) wordless friends:
Cheryl Andrews
Allison Howard
Barbara Lambert
Allyson Latta
Elizabeth Yeoman
Matilda Magtree 
Oh my, the geometry of this! And the summeriness, though I’m not sure why bowling seems summery to me. Just because anything I know about it is from the sunny long ago, I guess.
Despite my colour fiddling the sunniness of the day comes through, I think. Maybe that’s what’s twigging summer memories (as it was intended to!). Saw this place last year in a small town north of here… went inside and it was under some renovation but it looked like great things were happening. A little restaurant area being built, and a patio outside with a sort of beachy vibe. Had all the promise of being the new hot spot. My mother used to like watch bowling on TV… it always seemed slightly depressing, everyone inside in those shirts! Didn’t have any appeal to a kid who’d rather be reading in a tree. (:
I remember bowling in the ’50s when there were pin boys (to reset the pins) and their legs would dangle down and every once in awhile you’d hear a yelp when they didn’t get their legs out in time and a ball would hit them.
haha! I knew a man who, as a lad, was a pin boy, and he described exactly the danger you mention. I remember him saying that, otherwise, it was a pretty good job, though I can’t recall (or imagine) why.
Yes the geometry — and the wonderful colour! What a great hip of jubilation at the start of a smoggy day.