My son Ryan came home for Thanksgiving, and before he left, my dad and I had planned to take him and his brother to play Frisbee golf.
When I got up today, it was fifty-seven degrees below zero, and the wind was gusting with gusto (HA HA HA), and I knew the conditions were not, shall we say, optimal for the playing of disc golf. Or being outside, for that matter.
I called my dad, and asked him if he wanted to go out to lunch, instead. He suggested that we go bowling, and then go to lunch.
Now, I am a terrible bowler, and not a huge fan, but I love doing things with my dad, and I love doing things with my boys, so bowling was more of an excuse to spend more time together than we would if we only went to lunch.
I put on the best bowling shirt I own and drove over to the bowling alley, where my first three frames went like this: 0-1, 0-3, X. I went on to win that game with something around 150. I told Twitter: I just won at bowling, and didn't have to break anyone up to do it. Today, life does not imitate art.
The second game, I bowled spares through the first 7 frames, but my dad was matching me and dropping a few strikes in there himself, so by the 10th frame, I needed to throw a turkey (two strikes followed by a spare, incidentally, is now called a TOFURKEY in the Wheaton Hall of Bowling Nomenclature.) I didn't pull it off, and my dad edged me for the win. I told Twitter: I shanked my last ball, and didn't want to break up my parents to win, so my dad edged me out to win the second game.
Ryan and Nolan had a blast, too, giving out high fives, sincere and mocking applause as appropriate, and issuing the required number of Team Homer and Lebowski references.
After bowling, we went to Lucky Baldwin's for some pub food. When I got home, I made this stupid cell phone video in my living room:
It was truly wonderful to have three generations of Wheaton Men together, and it meant the world to me to spend the day with people I love, as both father and son.
In this video, I say that I won at bowling, but the more I think about it, today I feel kind of like I won at life.
