Yesterday was a friend’s birthday party, which she’d elected to hold at a bowling alley. Things started rather quietly, due to general uncertainty. Who were these people we’d only barely met? Would they play seriously or just to have fun? Would they (worst of all) be really good bowlers? Because, you see, I am decidedly not a good bowler.

Bowling, as everybody knows, involves a ball. And not just any ball, but a really big, really heavy ball. It also involves aiming. And neither of these components align with any skills that I have ever possessed. You could call me Ball Dyslexic because in my experience, balls generally do whatever they want to do and care not a whit for my intentions or desires. What is more, they generally follow physical and geometrical laws all their own with very little regard for the laws of physics and geometry that I learned in school.

So as I said, things started off quietly as we eyed each other’s relative bowling prowess as well as our relative senses of humor. (There’s nothing worse than cracking a joke and having everybody else give you The Look, that combination of puzzlement, distrust, and worry.) But as things progressed we loosened up and began to enjoy ourselves. We became comfortable with the steady magnetism that the gutters seemed to hold for our balls, we laughed at ourselves as our bodies began to get sore in unfamiliar places, and we jumped around like 11-year-olds when our balls, by some quirk of fate, managed to knock down all 10 pins.

Actually, no. There were 11-year-olds present, and they did not jump around when they made strikes or spares. They walked back like old pros, glancing at the electronic score boards to make sure the event had been properly recorded. But I digress.

Part way through the evening, we were all up-staged. A man and his seeing eye dog walked in and set up shop. His plan was to bowl for 24 straight hours to raise money for his trip to represent Team USA in Australia. And yes, that’s right… he was blind. He was blind, bowling for 24 hours, and on the US bowling team.

Luckily he was way at the other end of the alley. We all studiously ignored him and went back to tallying up our gutter balls and to shrieking with joy when we hit strikes and spares.