Have I Been Kidnapped by Marty McFly?

     I really thought I had  been kidnapped by Marty McFly today. I thought he must have put me in his super-souped-up DeLorean and whisked me back to the early '60s. Anyway, however way I got there, I ended up at a bowling alley. From what I could make out in the grayish fluorescent light, the acoustical tile ceiling, which must have been white at one time, was now sepia-tinged from decades of cigarette smoke. Above the pits a line of ceiling fans spun at high speed, rocking dizzily from the momentum and threatening to catapult themselves at any moment onto the hapless bowlers. Behind me where I sat watching, a speaker blared at an eardrum-shattering volume "Runaround Sue," "Duke of Earl," "Tears on My Pillow," and the like.

     My earliest experiences in a bowling alley occurred during the summers between elementary school grades, when I went with my mother to the alley on post. She belonged to a summer league along with one of her best friends who was also my godmother; her daughter Lynn was about my age. Lynn and I passed the time at the alley eating french fries and hot dogs, hiding out in the ladies' lounge playing games, and doing handstands and cartwheels outside on the grass. I never learned to bowl for fear of injuring my piano fingers by getting them stuck in the ball's holes while trying to throw. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it. Sometimes, though, my mother would let me be scorekeeper, which I rather liked to do. In those days, of course, they used overhead projectors and you wrote the numbers in by hand on a transparent sheet. At least I got to exercise my feeble math skills.

     At the alley where I was today, the absence of projected handwritten scores dispelled my initial suspicion that I had been spirited there by Marty McFly and his DeLorean time machine. When I saw the computerized score screens, I was assured of having remained in the 21st century. But you can't blame me for being temporarily confused -- you would have been, too, given "Runaround Sue" and the gray, almost surreal, light. Once I shook off my nostalgic daze, I thoroughly enjoyed watching my family laugh off gutter balls, stamp their feet in frustration at a missed spare, and give each other high fives after the all-too-rare strike. And when they finished, we walked out to the parking lot where I got into my brother's perfectly ordinary Subaru Outback.