bowling for barack

We took the kids bowling at the lake, which is something we've promised them for quite a while, but never done. It was a small, but perfectly okay bowling alley, although it was (oddly) only open for a three hour window on a late Sunday afternoon. This area is Touristy with a capital T, and we're still a month and a half away from "the season", so I guess we should be grateful it was open at all.


There were a few other groups in there, whiling away rainy Sunday hours, but from the moment we walked in we stuck out like sore thumbs. First there's my mom, who carries her flower child aura with her to this day, accentuated by the constantly changing array of bold ethnic jewelry. Then there's Sasquatch with his halfway down his back mane of curly brown locks. My face was still in weird post-roadkill blotch, so I was drawing some attention of the unwanted sort. Surfer Dude and Gumby, being fairly typical ten and twelve year old boys (at least until they talk), were our saving grace. We all collected our shoes and our cokes and headed for our lane.


Now I feel qualified to say this next thing, based on the amount of time I spent in Alabama growing up, and I don't mean it badly. Really. But I always think of the lake, as much as I love it, as "Hold my beer and watch this" territory. The kind of place Jeff Foxworthy might go to research his new stand-up routine. A place where you still see Confederate flags hanging on porches. A place populated by locals who...were not like us. And certainly did not want to be.


We were doing fine until Sasquatch brought up the Barack Obama story from a couple of weeks ago where he went bowling on the campaign trail and bowled a 37. Thats 3-7. Not a real shining moment in the public eye. As Jimmy Kimmel says "I bowled a 37 when I was a baby. And I was drunk, by the way."


This came up because Gumby was having an off day. A really off day. By the fifth frame he was barely sitting at 30. The other three of us bowling (my mom played cheerleader) were doing much better. Sasquatch, trying in his own way to be encouraging (and deflect everyone's attention from the fact that I was kicking his butt), said "Cheer up, G. You only need 8 more points to beat Obama." Well, that was a challenge that Gumby felt he could take on, and when (in the seventh frame!) he hit 38 his brothers danced around him chanting "You beat Obama, you beat Obama..."


And as the rest of the bowlers pushed back their hats and put their beer down to take a gander in our direction, we figured it was high time to mosey on out of there.