Just The Cathartic Adventure My Family Needed

Following my daughter’s bat mitzvah service and celebration two Saturdays ago, in the wake of all the soaring emotions and communal joy, my family has been going through “re-entry” into our normal way of life back here on Planet Reality. For reasons I’ll explain, last Saturday, a week after Elena’s Big Day, we found ourselves in very different circumstances: at a dingy neighborhood bowling alley in the suburban boonies of Rockaway, New Jersey, where the only people we knew were ourselves. And you know what? It was just the cathartic adventure we needed.

This was last Saturday night, to be precise. Elena had been invited to a bat mitzvah of a camp friend, whose celebration was taking place in a massive indoor field house a few miles from the bowling alley. During the prior week, we had tried to coordinate with other city families whose children were planning to go to the party in Jersey, but by the time the weekend came around, everyone else had bailed, claiming over-tiredness (which we could relate to), or that their child need to study for finals (ditto). But Elena still wanted to go, and the best alternative that we could come up with to get her there and back was to make a family outing of it: We’d all drive out–me and my wife, Rebecca, Elena, and our nine-year-old son, Adam; we’d drop Elena off at the field house; and then the three of us would go out for dinner and a movie, which later morphed into dinner and bowling.

We all stink at bowling, but what usually happens is the kiddie bumpers provide just enough of a cushion to our egos and our scores to make it fun and competitive. What happened during the first game on Saturday night, however, was unprecedented. For about 15 dazzling minutes, Rebecca became a superstar. With no assists from the kiddie bumpers, just on dumb luck and a sudden infusion of skill, she scored three strikes in a row and then a spare. She was shameless in victory, taking each strike as her cue to sashay around like she was the essence of cool.

Elena’s bat mitzvah service and celebration two weeks earlier had many memorable moments as well, but, for my wife and I at least, there wasn’t much in the way of giddy unscripted uncharted unexpected ridiculous fun. My wife’s rapid ascendance as a Queen Of The Lanes and all the commensurate posturing was the just the kind of post-bat mitzvah inner-family celebration we needed.

We bowled from around 9 to 10:30, before heading over to the field house to pick up Elena. To our surprise and delight, at 10pm the bowling alley dimmed the regular lights and turned on the disco lights and music for Saturday night “Laser Bowling,” as they called it.

Rebecca’s game suffered, but not her dance moves.

Eric Messinger is Editor of New York Family. He can be reached at emessinger@manhattanmedia.com