I wrote about my mother four years ago on the broad topic, but this will focus on keeping score in bowling. My sisters remember that she was in a league for at least a decade while in Binghamton, NY, and for about five years in Charlotte, NC. Recently, I learned from one of my sisters that my mother got her bank job in Charlotte because she had been the captain of her bowling team, which showed that she displayed leadership qualities! I did not know that!
In Binghamton, she bowled with her good friend Pat Fink, later Jones. But my sisters say she was also on a team with Pat Whitfield Jones, a woman from our church who was a daughter of my godparents; my parents were her son Walter’s godparents.
I don’t specifically remember where my mom and her friends bowled. But I’m sure I went to some of her league games with her.
Keeping score
Moreover, as noted, I learned to keep score in bowling from my mother and/or her friends. But with the current lanes, scoring is automatic. I was mildly saddened when I first experienced this “new” thing.
Here’s a real sidebar, where Cory Doctorow alluded to a phenomenon: “I used to walk around with a hundred phone numbers in my head. Now I remember two, maybe three on a good day. Which is fine!…
“Whenever we adopt a cognitive prosthesis, there’s always someone who overweights the value of the old system of unassisted thinking, while ignoring the cool things we can do with the free capacity we get…
“Versions of this continue to play out. When I was a kid, there was a moral panic that pocket calculators would make us all innumerate (an argument advanced by people who know so little about mathematics that they think it’s the same thing as arithmetic).
“Now I keep hearing about millennials who can’t read an analog clock, a skill that has as much objective utility as knowing how to interpret a slide-rule or convert from Francs to Lire to Deutschemarks. Not actually useless, but entirely bound to a specific time and place and a mere historical curiosity at some later date.” [I’m not sure I agree with the analog clock analogy, but whatever.]
Yet I still can keep scoring in bowling, which has value to me. I love that my mother taught me something of what is now of limited applicability precisely because it links us not only to the task but also to a specific timeframe. My childhood memory is remarkably spotty, so I embrace whatever connection exists.
Family
My father and my sisters would occasionally bowl, but my sisters said they weren’t very good at it. This was before bowling establishments installed barriers to prevent people from throwing gutter balls. I was pretty competent in my few years in a league. I assume the years of my mother’s play made her a decent bowler.
So this was Roger and his mom again, which is cool. Gertrude Elizabeth (Trudy) Green, nee Williams, died on this date in 2011.
One of my sisters suggested I write about my mother and bowling. I was resistant because I don’t particularly remember the details. Where did she bowl? How good was she? Who, besides her good friend Pat, was on her team?