A season ends with perspective on time, memory and growing older
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Eavesdropping in a bowling center is roughly akin to roller skating on gravel or trying to read during a Bruce Springsteen concert.
It’s possible, but not recommended.
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Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but overhear something that rang true as another season came to a close last week. As I unlaced my shoes and got ready to leave, having pocketed nearly 200 bucks after a particularly satisfying series, the bowling alley philosopher spoke.
“When I was in my 60s,” he said to a friend as they paused behind me, nearing the snack bar, “I never talked about my age. Now that I’m past 70, I talk about it all the time, whenever it comes up.”
With that, he disappeared, heading for the parking lot and a summer of presumed leisure, living his best life, God bless him.
When you find yourself in that kind of position — fascinated but not wanting to intrude — you don’t always get a good look at the person who dropped pearls of wisdom, so I never saw his face.
It could have been anyone in the seniors league, a collection of men who had convened every Friday morning since Labor Day, both for the competition and the camaraderie. The only qualification, aside from not shying away from embarrassing yourself publicly once a week for nine months, is being over 50.
To lift a line from Jackson Browne, I passed that point long ago.
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I haven’t actually done the math, but having turned 71 last winter, I’m probably in the upper third of the 60 or so guys who show up for a chance to miss a 10-pin spare or to leave another ghastly split.
Bowling is nature’s way of reminding a person, often quite emphatically, that getting older is simply not for the faint of heart.
Oh, there are ways to circumvent the aging process — plastic surgery, implants, hair weaves and the like — but vanity ceased being a priority of mine right around the time I hit 30. That’s when going gray ceased to be a future concern and stopped by to stay.
It’s not as if I wasn’t tempted to dip my toe into the fountain of youth … I was, but to me it seemed like holding back the tide with a colander, a futile and empty gesture aimed at an impossible target.
I remember the facile arrogance of a one-time pop-art slogan that caught on and, for a while, found its way into the cultural zeitgeist.
“Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse,” the Day-Glo posters read, tacked to the walls of pizza joints and record shops.
It was a natural extension, I suppose, of the youthful school of logic that advised not to trust anyone over 30, which was easy enough to swallow when that age seemed impossibly far away, the equivalent of landing on the moon or winning the war in Vietnam.
As Bob Seger once observed, ain’t it funny what you remember?
Just two words: Kent State.
I was 15 years old on May 4, 1970, a ninth grade student, the son of two college professors, living in a nice house with my younger sister and brother, a home where three newspapers arrived daily, where books were everywhere and music filled the air.
Dad had earned his master’s degree at Kent State, and I was born just outside the city in a little town called Ravenna, which meant that when news of the student shootings erupted, it felt personal.
As Neil Young sang in his shaky voice, “Four dead in Ohio.”
Since that bloody Monday and the cover-up that inevitably followed, I’ve pretty much become inured to waiting for the truth to prevail, though I did take part in a campus protest some years later, one aimed at preventing a gymnasium from being built on the site where the shootings occurred, and for my trouble, I got tear-gassed.
It seemed like a small price to pay, considering what it cost Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder.
The world seems even more dangerous these days, but you don’t need me to tell you that. Any sentient human can feel the dread.
If you take in a view from 30,000 feet up, if you widen your perspective, it’s doubtless less chaotic than it seems on the ground.
“I’d love to change the world,” read the lyrics of a Ten Years After song, “but I don’t know what to do … so I’ll leave it up to you.”
It’s been 55 years since that tune graced the airwaves, and its message is still being deciphered. Was it a call to lie back, stay in the shadows, not say anything, or was it a call to take action?
Perhaps that very question was posed as the 50-and-over bowling league adjourned for the summer. Maybe there was an answer to it.
If so, I hope it takes root and blossoms into something resembling a more promising tomorrow, though I have some doubts about that.
The distance from the foul line to the head pin is 60 feet, but it can feel a lot farther when you’re standing on the approach, knowing that whatever happens on your next roll can make or break you.
What matters, in the end, is you’re still standing, aware of what has to be done and feeling confident you can do it.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to join him on his Facebook page, where gutter balls are part of the game of life.
