Week 7. Family Life.

Sunday night marked my return to the Sport after a 3-week hiatus. It's hard to believe I had gone so long without hitting the Lanes with my "Sunday night family," as they've taken to calling themselves. It seems a fitting moniker, given the general level of crazy present in the fellowship.

At the Lanes, Hot Toddies
are served in paper cups.

Take, for instance Varsity TT, who showed up to the bowling alley and ordered a HOT TODDY because, as he said "I'm sick, but I still want to drink." I don't know who goes to a bowling alley decorated with full-scale wall mural carpet art and a vending bank that offers Yoohoo! chocolate soda, and orders a drink preferred by English manor lords. Well...actually, I guess I do. My new brother in-bowling. The guy who also shows up with the Girl Scout Candy Catalog and works the lanes between his turns: "Hey R., while you're flying high off that strike you just made, can I interest you in some malted milk balls?"

Seven cash sales to show for it!

I really can't complain about him as a family member, when I think about some of my own. I don't know if it's the hot brown liquid in the paper cup that calls it to mind, or the sensation of spending hours sitting in four seats occupying only 20 square feet (such as the ones at the head of lane 45 Sunday night, or such as the ones inside my family's Bronco as we drove hundreds of barren, empty miles across West Texas on our way to New Mexico ski country when I was a preteen), but I got to thinking about my dad... 

On those Dantean roadtrips, my brother and I were united in the penance of doing time, while my dad had his mind solely on making time. It's possible he had factored into the trip the cost of receiving a ticket for speeds clocked at up to 40 miles-per-hour over the legal limit, for how comfortable he was racing hellbent to the jagged, punishing peaks of Taos. 

These drives would always result in an inevitable, incredible bladder-searing pain due to inability to stop because we hadn't reached "the right point." My brother and I would spend hours parched and numbed in the backseat, listening to his lectures about Ancient Greece and the philosophy of the Spartans, willing ourselves to NEED NO LIQUID for any reason, just like any good Spartan could. 

Alas, we would always be faced with the felling temptation of a drive-thru McDonalds or quick stop at a convenience store... which brings me back around to bowling and Hot Toddies. 

My brother always being more impulsive and pleasure-seeking than I, broke down and bought himself a drink during one of these stops. It wasn't a big drink--just a modest-sized paper cup of life sustaining liquid. It must have tasted so damned delicious. I can't remember him drinking it, but I can so vividly recall the look of strained pain on his face 2 hours later as he couldn't hold it any more. The pronouncement was handed back solemnly from the front seat: the empty paper cup. And yes, you can be sure, it rode with us, steaming and full-to-the-brim until my dad determined exactly the right point to pull over and leave it on the side of a long, desolate West Texas highway just East of New Mexico.

Sorry, Varsity TT, for possibly forever ruining the Hot Toddy for you. But, hey, it's the least a little sister could do. 

And so, with that, let us hasten to the results from Sunday night:

The Hoff: 153 (all-time high game), 81 (all-time low game), 125

Al: 81, 120, 120

Varsity TT: 118, 126, 113

Flo: 122, 88, 109

Rounds of beer/Hot Toddies: 3

Games won: 2

Authentic(?) bowling sayings picked up from Super Sub G.: 5

"That's gonna hold!"

"Somebody call the police! You were robbed!"

"That lane bites!" 

"That lane is torched!"

"MAN-ischewitz!"

Just in case you were waiting with baited breath for this week's revelation of the TRBC's newest drinking game, it involves one of Varsity TT's Authentic(?) bowling sayings: "PICK THAT SHIT UP!" One drink for every time he shouts that out. That's alot of drinks when you're playing with the TRBC, because we're so often so very "robbed."