Today, I had another bowling outing with my brother. However, this time, we were joined by my sister, her husband, and their two sons, and we went to the Ryan Family Amusement Center in Raynham for duckpin bowling, something I had never tried, even though I’ve had occasion to previously.
It was interesting to me to see how my tenpin skills transferred to duckpin. My main problem was that, although I had seen enough duckpin bowling on TV in my youth to know that the game plays similar to candlepin (where you have to try to keep the ball straight rather than try to hook it), my ball still wanted to move right to left. I tried to combat that tendency by starting on the left side of the lane and trying to go over somewhere around the third arrow walking toward that spot, but I had too varying degrees of success to really score well.
This is not to say I didn’t have my moments. In the fifth frame of the first game, I had something that would be considered an unusual spare leave in tenpin and picked it up, and I had a “Brooklyn” ball (to use the familiar tenpin term) that might have been a strike except that I missed on the first ball, so that was only scored a spare. Toward the end, I had what I thought was my best moment. I had a perfect ball that hit the 1-3 pocket and left just the 10 pin, and I did what I do for my tenpin 10 pin: moved left, went over the third arrow, and (this time) kept it straight to pick off the 10 for a spare. My brother-in-law only paid for an hour and a half, so we had to cut the second game short.
The occasion was my brother-in-law’s birthday, so my brother and I gave him our gifts before leaving the place, and I told my sister that, although the outing was fun, it was my desire to show my nephews what I can do on a tenpin lane sometime in the future. I hope she listens.
The Tenth Board 