Notes in November 2

Meditation After a Fall

Original Upload: Saturday, April 3, 2010

Falle is nix, abers ufschte.

It is easier to fall than to get up.

(An old Pennsylvania Dutch Expression)

I fell recently and broke my leg and I have been cobbling around in a cast for five weeks. It has slowed me down, but I refuse to let it get me down. Don’t jump to conclusions: it was not your typical septuagenarian accident in a slippery bathtub: I did a flip on the new-fangled floor of a high-tech bowling alley after overstepping the foul line.

This was a double fluke. I am not a very sporting person. In fact, I play no sports and watch no sports. I have always believed that team sports are a breeding ground for hatred, bigotry and warmongering. Sorry, sports fans, but that is how I am. Competition, it seems to me, breeds contempt. It is a lesson I learned as an oddball growing up in a football town.

My wife Olga and I attended a Puerto Rico Convention Bureau “Meet & Deal” activity at a new bowling alley in Caguas.  After the reception, the owner invited us to bowl—something I don’t remember doing since I was at Hellertown Junior High School c. 1954. It was my first time in over 50 years, and given the outcome and my interest in sports, most likely the last.

But it did inspire a spate of memories that had been long hidden, including my brief career as a pin boy. Pins—the things at the end of the alley you are supposed to hit with your bowling ball—are now gathered up by a robot and dropped into place. But when I was a boy, it was a boy who did that, and I was a boy who did that. I was paid by the game (a dime or a quarter, I don’t remember how much) and all the boys were allowed to bowl for free when there were no customers.

The bowling alley was on the main street —and one of the only streets—of Hellertown (see above) and you had to pass it on the way to and from the school. I stopped in at first to play the pinball machines—one of my early passions—and eventually was offered a job.

I don’t really remember much more than learning to bowl, spotting the pins, and dropping all my earnings into the pinball machine, which I mastered, and it couldn’t have lasted very long. I do remember that I was just discovering Shakespeare at the time and was probably the only pin boy who jumped up and down the alley in iambic pentameter… I told you I was an oddball.

It was one of my first jobs and if I hadn’t slipped in Caguas, you may never have heard about it!