This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, June, 2016
You’re practicing one afternoon at your local bowling center in the middle of June. A 34-year-old father of two (a six-year-old boy and four-year-old girl, each of whom has a similarly aged and gendered friend along), who made the novel profession choice of schoolteacher and thus gets the prize of toting the kids around all summer, directs his group to a nearby lane and does his best to keep the youngsters from running off into other lanes, bowlers and pinsetters.
In the very first frame, Gord’s daughter’s friend defies all probabilities of physics and wedges her ball in the gutter, despite the bumpers being raised.
Naïve Gord, who is only doing his best to treat his kids and their friends to an afternoon of fun, does not know there is any difference between the surface of the approach and the surface of the lane.
His confident stride begins.
Of the four kids, maybe one (his daughter) is actually paying attention. The daughter’s friend is still crying and thus vaguely glancing through salty, distorted lenses. The two boys are beating each other with the licorice Gord had to buy in order to keep their screeching to a minimum.
And here he is—the adult, the infallible father who can and does solve every problem in these kids’ lives—about to give the children a rude awakening.
The blissful ignorance you sense around you is enviable. You almost wish you didn’t know what was going to happen. You might even feel a twinge of guilt for pulling your phone out and setting it to video.
Here he goes. One step over the line.
He’s still upright, but here comes his first oil-filled push-off step. His footing is no longer secure. He didn’t expect this, so a little panic shakes his entire body. His weight shifts wildly and, combined with his complete lack of trust in the floor beneath his rental shoes, his limbs flail.
In his head, he sees his life flashing before him. He doesn’t know how much it’s going to hurt or even where. His eyes convey a mixture of terror and sheer disdain, which amazingly has time to amply grow during his desperate floundering.
It’s scrambling time for this poor man, but you know it’s already over. He’s going to bite it, and our only hope now, as decent humans, is the most pain to come will be from embarrassment.
Gord’s heel tries to support his thrashing body by itself.
His daughter sobs. The friend’s sobbing escalates to howls. His son, face of shock and horror, bawls just as his friend thwaps him in the eye with his licorice, so now the kid is crying for two reasons. Their father is no longer the image of perfection. This is life-altering and confusing for the kids. They can’t get home to Mommy fast enough.
His footing is gone. Both feet are in the air with no hope of regaining traction or balance.
His only crime was being naïve, and now his highly embarrassing learning moment is going to live, probably with vertical orientation, on the Internet forever. As a teacher, he will have to deal with at least one of his students finding this video every single year for the rest of his career.
Which body part will hit first? A sure-to-be-lacerated elbow? A let’s-hope-not head? As much surface area as possible?
This innocent man, trying to give his kids a fun activity, is on his way to fleeting physical and everlasting emotional pain. His kids are going to laugh at him. They’re going to tell their mother all about it, and she’s going to laugh at him. The physical scars may heal eventually, but they’ll be the really noticeable, bumpy kind. And he’ll be covered in oil.
Splat. He is down.
The worst part: you’re bowling on that pair in league tonight, and now the fronts are completely gone.