Seeking the Gutter

Jeepers turned out to be a non-starter, so I was casting about for an alternative birhtday activity for Mo. A party like we had for Em wouldn't be a treat, it would be torture for her. Such gatherings inspire her to hide out, act out and even flee the house. For that matter, Jeepers would be improved greatly if they took out most of the arcade games and all the other people. I mean, without soaping the windows and posting a 'closed' sign.

Chuck-E-Cheese was suggested, but they don't have rides, the most important thing at Jeepers. 'Curious George' is showing, but Mo's already going to see that on a field trip Monday. I never got to go to a movie theater on a field tirp, but these modern times...

Cosmic Mini-Golf was something I considered. It's an indoor putt-putt lit mainly with black lights and using flourescent balls and with flourescent borders on the edges of the greens. Well, they're not greens, they're blacks, it's really pretty spooky. Mo likes to walk around the place but I wasn't sure how she'd do with something as organized as golfing, and they were surprisingly busy when we went by there. Go figure, it's usually a ghost-town so they get busy the one time I consider popping for a game.

Mo has bowled with Special Olympics in the past. I thought that'd be a fun trip, and even scouted out the lanes SO uses so there'd be continuity.

She did pretty well with the first game. She seemed to be enjoying herself, though I had to get on her for the overhanded throw. I know it's an eight-pounder, not a full-weight ball, but I still figure it'll bang a dent in the wood when thrown from four feet in the air. I got to see the gutter-ball dance, which I'd only heard about before. Mo loves a gutter ball.

I think I know why. A gutter ball is incredibly orderly. It goes in a perfectly straight course and leaves all ten pins standing. She dances for gutter balls like I dance for a spare. I don't have a strike dance because I don't think I've ever gotten a strike.

Okay, I don't think I've ever posted a three-digit score at bowling. I should use bumpers.

I turned bumpers on for the second game, because Em was getting frustrated and I thought maybe Mo would grove on the novelty of knocking some pins down. Em had actually gotten a spare in the first game, and on a pretty ugly split, the 1 & 10 I believe. The ball looked like it'd go right between them, then it veered into the 1-pin with more noise than it's visual speed seemed to predict. Good on her.

Em loved having bumpers, though. She doesn't find any elegance in a gutter ball, and some of her pitches would go in a graceful arc down the wood, threatening to smash straight into that first pin only to had into the gutter about a foot from the balls.

Mo got a strike. Em got a spare where she knocked down all ten on her second ball, which seems like a strike to me.

But bumpers pissed Mo off. She actually threw a ball on top of the bumper, and she attempted something that, like the gutter-ball dance, I'd only heard of before. She threw the ball onto the neighboring lane, where some fairly serious bowlers were playing. The guy who was about to go when Mo's pink eight-pounder came into his field of view was a good sport about it.

So Mo was getting whinier with each frame, and I decided to get some refreshments for the honyocks while I tried to figure out how to take the bumpers back down on her name mid-game. I took them to the concession stand, where Em asked for a cookie. Mo wanted a cookie too, or so I gathered, but she got fussier and fussier and said 'machine.'

I thought she meant the vending machine, which was down a ways from the concession stand. I thought maybe there had been a routine related to Special Olympics, so we went to the vending machine. I asked her what she wanted, and she said, 'Chocolate!' So I fed a buck in and asked what kind. She hit the coin-return, grabbed the emerging bill and headed for the miniature arcade. She looked, seemingly at random, for a game that took dollars, and after she settled on one, and it had taken her dollar she walked away from it. Em tried her luck at it, but Mo was still unhappy.

I led the girls back to our lane, trying to get Mo to focus on the game again, but the next time Em was up, Mo bolted for the arcade area, cutting through several people's tables and I had to run around a bunch of kids who were trying to change their shoes on the fucking floor in front of the shoe counter (isn't there an etiquette about that???), and when I caught up to her she was in full core meltdown, so we packed up and left.

Oh, and I'm not much of a bowler, but when did they invent this slicker-than-grease shit for the lanes? On my second or third frame, I thought I was a little forward with my plant-foot. Turns out, I thought right, as I bruised my knee and elbow and pulled at least two muscles in a Jerry Lewis follow-through. Didn't hit a single pin, either. They have a warning sign, I noticed later, about that foul-line meaning business. I guess they're trying to use all the silicone they don't put in women's chests these days into Lane 20 at Mission Bowl.

It was embarrassing, though not as embarrassing as explaining to the library that you've lost another DVD to the cold-air return...