英语书籍：Bowling Across America（4）

英语书籍：Bowling Across America（4）ZT

=====TODAY'S BOOK=====================

BOWLING ACROSS AMERICA
50 States in Rented Shoes
by Mike Walsh (nonfiction)

Published by St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 9780312366193
Text Copyright (c) 2008 by Mike Walsh
BOWLING (Part 4 of 5)
======================================

(continued from Wednesday)

Leaving Honeywell was a tremendous risk. Aside from abandoning the
security of working for a major corporation, he had to create his
business from scratch. This involved driving from potential customer
to potential customer with a trunk full of air conditioner parts,
introducing himself, and hoping he could sell enough to feed his
family this month and create enough relationships to feed them for
years. In the end it worked out, enabling him to send six children
to college and look well after his wife, who would later join him as
the company's vice president and an invaluable peer in running the
business.

His passing, now 16 months ago, triggered thoughts of making my own
break. In trying to recapture what advice he might have given me as
I considered the status quo versus taking more dramatic action, I
was reminded of a metaphor he often repeated on the subject of risk.

"You can make safe choices and sleep well," he would say, or you can
take risks and eat well. Eating well is a h ell of a lot more
interesting, but it does keep you up at night."

This from a man whose snoring was a known quantity in the
neighborhood. On a summer's night with the windows open, the
rhythmic rumble emanating from his sinuses would broadcast from his
bedroom and echo off neighboring houses. Sam, an Irish setter
belonging to the Dawsons, would be found whimpering under their
backyard deck, stricken with fear at what beast had been on the
prowl in the subdivision overnight. Over time my mother had learned
to live with it, often by leaving their bedroom to sleep in another.
This is my memory from the better years, when past risks taken and
past sleep lost meant both sleeping and eating well for the Walsh
family.

There were lean years, though, when the business was struggling to
get off the ground, when an embezzling employee nearly bankrupted
the company. In those years there was little snoring to be heard.
Dad never fully explained that, when pursuing an "eating well" life
course, one's ability to "sleep well" is often interrupted by the
inability to eat at all, never mind "well." As novel as it "may"
have seemed to occasionally have "breakfast for dinner," what this
meant was that eggs and pancake batter was about as well as we could
do.

Though he let us children draw our own conclusions about whether we
wanted to pursue a life of eating or sleeping well, it was clear
which he favored. Which brings me back to my own legal pad and the
growing list of states in its margins, another product of my
father's mind.

Dad's more well-known goal with regard to handball (I don't know how
widely he shared the whole "wanting to die on the court" thing with
others) was to play at least one game in every state and on every
continent. This was his personal quest, undertaken like some men
decide to climb Everest or run a marathon. This was the task he left
unfinished.

Though it was certainly one of his many passions, he never made
this round-the-world goal a full-time pursuit. Running the business,
raising the six of us, and going on bike rides with his wife took
precedence over geographic domination of an obscure indoor sport.
Plus, he started late: he didn't begin collecting states until he'd
settled in, developed commitments and obligations, mortgages and
tuitions. So he would arrange to play when in Minnesota to visit
family, in California for a convention, in New York on a trip with
his sons. He once wrote to a well-known retired basketball coach who
he'd read was a handball player and arranged a game with him in
Idaho during a business trip. Dad did it because he loved the game,
because the romance of doing something unique in each state inspired
him, and because of the profound joy he took from social interaction
with the old and new friends he met on the court. This, of course,
was the reason for the map and the stickers on his office wall. The
colors and numbers on the stickers were a consequence of his
grabbing the first thing he'd found in the supply cabinet he could
use to mark his newly mounted map. The twenty-eight states with
stickers were those in which he'd played a game before playing his
last on his home court in Ohio.

More than any specific interests I had in common with him, I shared
the sensibility required to fall in love with such a quest. Anyone
can merely visit every state. Anyone can see a game at every Major
League Baseball park, or ride every wooden roller coaster. And these
are noble and worthy goals in and of themselves. But how many people
can say they have not only been to but also played a little known
sport within every state? Handball's outsider status in the sporting
and social pecking order added a degree of obscurity and quirkiness,
a touch of uniqueness, that made it his. I always liked that about
it, even if I wasn't a handball player.

During college I announced my intent to bowl in all 50 states as a
kind of emulative gesture--a nod to the old man's quest with a bent
to make it mine. Granted, I was no more a bowler than I was a
handball player, but then it wasn't really about the sport so much
as it was about the adventure. Besides, handball hurts your hands.

I figured if I worked at checking off states, perhaps I could catch
up to him. Perhaps we could begin to work the missing states
together, hitting a handball court and a bowling alley in each. We
could make Hawaii the fiftieth for both of us, and celebrate with
much fan-fare and ceremony. And a steak dinner.

He never asked, because I think he understood, why I would choose
bowling of all activities. "Why not badminton or checkers?" others
would wonder, exposing the arbitrary nature of my selection of
bowling. The answer was that I'd always found bowling alleys to be
wildly romantic--in the nostalgic-reminiscence sense of the term,
not the cuddle-up-and-listen-to-Barry-White-by-the-fire sense. What
other place in American society could you find such a cross section
of people? What recreational activity offers more opportunity for
both competition and socialization? Bowling's egalitarian
accessibility--for around five dollars anyone can borrow all the
equipment and roll a game--makes it a great equalizer. Everyone--
rich, poor, black, white, male, female, transgendered, handicapped--
can get to the foul line and have a shot at the pins. Few do it
enough to be good, much less own their own equipment, which puts
people of all backgrounds in rented shoes rolling a ball that was
made for someone else. It matters not whether it's a group of
suburban rich kids, a senior citizens' league, or a family of four
spending their only entertainment dollars for the month: everyone
looks equally ridiculous in ill-fitting blue and red shoes trying to
balance their weight against that of a heavy three-holed ball.
Everyone feels equally silly when they roll a gutterball, and
equally proud when they roll a strike. The advent of gutter guards
for kids and devices to assist the handicapped in getting the ball
down the lane means that truly anyone can bowl.

This accessibility makes the bowling alley a rich environment for
people watching. Any given bowling alley on any given day becomes a
microcosm of the community in which it sits. The bowling alley is a
gathering place, and much more transpires within its confines than
merely a series of sporting contests divided into ten frames. People
don't just bowl in bowling alleys. They eat and drink. They karaoke.
They fall in love. They have s ex, as foul as that sounds. They
spend the one Saturday afternoon a month they have custody of their
son there. They forget about work, home, tragic news headlines. And
they smoke. Man, do they smoke.

(continued on Friday)