{"id":1519,"date":"2017-12-29T08:18:53","date_gmt":"2017-12-29T16:18:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=1519"},"modified":"2017-12-29T08:18:53","modified_gmt":"2017-12-29T16:18:53","slug":"a-bowling-grandma-steps-up-to-the-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2017\/12\/29\/a-bowling-grandma-steps-up-to-the-line\/","title":{"rendered":"A Bowling Grandma Steps Up to the Line"},"content":{"rendered":"

The University of Arizona is a land-grant college.\u00a0 At the time I enrolled, 1962, incoming freshmen were required to take four semesters of Phys. Ed.\u00a0\u00a0 This was decades before my late-breaking interest in physical fitness.\u00a0 Due to vision and coordination problems, sports participation had always been the bane of my existence, so I was not exactly thrilled at the prospect.<\/p>\n

Since I was afraid of water and had never learned to swim, I decided to kill two birds with one stone by signing up for beginning swimming.\u00a0 At the end of the first semester, I still couldn\u2019t fulfill the final requirement of making it from the deep end to the shallow end.\u00a0 At that point, Ms. Knopf, my instructor, took me aside and gave me a talking to.\u00a0 She said she\u2019d give me a passing grade in beginning swimming on the condition that I sign up to take the class again the next semester.\u00a0 We both kept our parts of that bargain, and at the end of my second semester in beginning swimming I could pass the deep end to shallow end test.\u00a0 Do I love swimming to this day?\u00a0 No, but at least I know I won\u2019t drown.<\/p>\n

I grew up watching Robin Hood on TV, so for my third PE venture, I signed up for archery.\u00a0 Try as I might, I was forever whacking my left arm when I let go of the string, so that semester was spent with the inside of my arm black and blue from wrist to elbow.<\/p>\n

For PE semester number four, I chose bowling.\u00a0 I had bowled some with the Girl Scouts at the Rec Center in Bisbee.\u00a0 How hard could it be?\u00a0 Turns out it was hard.\u00a0 The instructor failed to realize that some of her students, and one in particular, knew absolutely nothing about bowling\u2014including how to properly grip the ball.\u00a0 I did so with my thumb and the next two fingers over which is \u2026 well \u2026 wrong.\u00a0 And the instructor never noticed.\u00a0 On the day of the final exam, she did go so far as to say I had a \u201cvery unusual delivery,\u201d without realizing why, which, in my book, counts as a teacher failure as opposed to a student failure.\u00a0 Once that semester ended, I didn\u2019t set foot in a bowling alley for decades.<\/p>\n

Having seen the title of this post, you may be asking yourself, \u201cWhat changed?\u201d In addition to getting her steps, is J.A. Jance now well on her way to becoming a championship bowler?\u00a0 NO!\u00a0 What changed is, I became the grandma of a boy who loves bowling.<\/p>\n

Colt\u2019s father, Jon, spent the last nine years of his life battling malignant melanoma, so I thought it was especially smart of my daughter to find a sport Colt loves which doesn\u2019t require sunscreen.\u00a0 He started out in a neighborhood league at Tech City Bowl three or four years ago, and took to bowling like a duck to water.\u00a0 He\u2019s twelve now and has bowled his way towards more than $1000 in college scholarship money by participating in tournaments.<\/p>\n

But to BOWL in tournaments, he has to GO to tournaments, and one of those happened to be at Kenmore Lanes during the first week of Christmas break, while Colt was out of school and his mom was at work.\u00a0 So at ten o\u2019clock in the morning on Thursday, Grandma stepped into the breach.\u00a0 We had dinner plans for later that evening, but my daughter assured me that the tournament would be over by four.<\/p>\n

Colt\u2019s job was to bowl.\u00a0 Mine was to keep the pin sheets so we could show them to his coach later.\u00a0 The problem is, Kenmore Lanes is a bowling alley which doesn\u2019t electronically show which pins are left standing.\u00a0 More often than not, Colt would have to come away from the approach to change what I\u2019d written.\u00a0 As for keeping score?\u00a0 Forget about it.\u00a0 The idea that you can\u2019t fill in one frame until several frames later continues to be a bit of a mystery to me.\u00a0 Some of the more experienced bowling moms tried to give me an assist in that regard, but math has never been my thing.\u00a0 That\u2019s one of the reasons I\u2019m a writer.\u00a0 I\u2019m almost as good at Arithmetic as I am at \u2026 well \u2026 swimming, bowling, or archery.<\/p>\n

\"\"Colt did well in the first frame and then dropped down some, but he did well enough in the first five games to make the first cut.\u00a0 In the second, he smoothed out, without making the highest scores but with good consistency\u2014enough so that he made the second cut at # 9 out of 9.\u00a0 In the first of the semi-final games, he scored eight strikes!!! and came in with a 247.\u00a0 Adding in his 50 pin handicap gave him a score of 297 that was within spitting distance of a perfect 300.\u00a0 And it was also good enough to put him into the finals against two other bowlers, 8 year-old Leilani, who went into the finals at number one, and at number 2, Alejandro, who is at least a year or two older than Colt.<\/p>\n

As you can see from the photo, by the time the last frame was over, at five to five, Colt was number one.\u00a0 We made it to dinner on time just barely, with Colt still wearing his ear-to-ear grin, but he\u2019d better watch his back.\u00a0 Leilani is only eight.\u00a0 She\u2019s coming for him, and I\u2019m pretty sure she knows how to keep score.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The University of Arizona is a land-grant college.\u00a0 At the time I enrolled, 1962, incoming freshmen were required to take four semesters of Phys. Ed.\u00a0\u00a0 This was decades before my late-breaking interest in physical fitness.\u00a0 Due to vision and coordination problems, sports participation had always been the bane of my existence, so I was not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,150],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","category-holidays"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-ov","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1519"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1519\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1521,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1519\/revisions\/1521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}