The Innocence of Youth

My grandson celebrated his 4th birthday last weekend and he had his heart set on a bowling party. So on Saturday, there he was at Hollywood Bowl with 6 of his little 4 year old friends pushing, dropping and shoving their respective bowling balls down the alley.

There were a few times it was painful to watch the ball slowly, slowly come to a stop immediately in front of the 10 standing pins. It was almost like you could hear the pins taunting the ball.

It was also quite clear (when you're watching the ball in slow motion you notice much more than you otherwise would) that there are small grooves at the end of the alley, at the end of the gutter guards and immediately in front of the pins that caused the balls when going excruciatingly slow to veer off to the left or the right gutters without making contact with the pins at all. This, unfortunately, was a frequent occurrence.

Regardless, those 7 little kids had so much fun and were incredibly happy if they even got one pin down (let's be honest, everyone in the entire group was happy if they knocked one pin down, not just the kids). It also could have been a study in psychology because clearly the little girls were much more aggressive at this sport than the boys. One little 4 year old got a score of 80!

This timidity was even true of my grandson who had actually practiced in Bend in August. However, that particular alley had the little slide where he could put his ball at the top and it gathered enough momentum to get all the way down the alley with some impact left to spare. In this instance, the hard push concept just wasn't clicking, or it was just too hard.

My point being, these kids were lucky if they got 10 pins for the entire game but they had an absolute blast. A little cheese pizza, a little bowling, some stickers, cupcakes & ice cream and they each had a day made in heaven (and probably the best night's sleep of their lives).

Maybe that's the key, as adults we need to seriously rethink what is required to make us happy. We should literally scale back our expectations and our greed and find satisfaction and joy in everyday stuff like time with our families, beautiful flowers, good music, staying in touch with friends, a tasty home-cooked meal or a good old-fashioned board game.

Life is meant to be enjoyed, period. Just because I'm significantly older than my grandson and his friends doesn't give me any right to forget that.