Monday 8 November 2010

Hubris again.

This story exhumed to help Steve Capelin feel better.

Para Bowls in Eden

Sis dragged me there just in time to stop me going totally ga-ga. We had been nursing Mum twenty-four seven for over a year and were worn out. Most days I rode my ninety-nine cc two wheeler to Jen’s house to put in a full day of feeding, toileting, making tea and cooking, washing, making beds and entertaining our darling ninety-three year old stroke destroyed mother, then riding back to Tiziana to be rocked to sleep or battered into wakefulness by extremes of Eden weather.

To get me to meet people, Sis organized a sitter for Mum and booked us in to play indoor bowls at the Sports Club. Althouth I have always loved watching cricket and do appreciate the skill of a good lawn bowler, I had never played bowls. I was a cleanskin.

After introductions, the bustling good humoured woman in charge assigned us to teams. As a newie, I got to bowl second.

Of course, I did all the dumb things like releasing the bowl with the bias on the wrong side, seriously disrupting a game two rinks away, running off the mat and threatening the glass windows at the end of the room, but I did improve and by the third end was keeping the bowl on the mat.

By the fourth and fifth end I was outbowling the lead player in our team, a young woman of maybe forty, fit and confident-looking and began to congratulate myself on my emerging prowess.

At the point in the last end when the 'skip' plays for keeps, the young lady who had been providing the benchmark to which I had aspired, then surpassed, walked out of earshot.

Taking advantage of her absence, the skip leaned over and whispered,
‘She’s not bad for a blind person, is she!’

Pic borrowed from Lawn Bowls Dictionary by Keith Dunstan .

9 comments:

  1. Hehehe.

    Maybe next time you could try your hand at wheelchair rugby, Stafford?

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  2. Playing bowls, rinks, cleanskin, running off the mat, the skip .... help! I need an Aussie slang dictionary!

    You just need more time to develop your game, Mr. Ray!

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  3. Thanks Stafford. I can relate to more than one element of your story. My dad had a stroke and I used to arrange for my workmates to have an afternoon bowl every now and then at the bowls club near his nursing home. I'd bring him down and though he could no longer bowl he was never short of advice to the newies.
    Beating people with handicaps is so satisfying until the humbling truth emerges.
    I feel much better now. Thanks for the cross link.

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  4. New things can be funny! We could probably look for more new things to do, just for laughs. I remember my first cross country skiing, I fell so many times, and laughed and laughed. Maybe I'll try being a concert pianist next?

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  5. I guffawed 'til I dribbled, SR. Good yarn to cheer up the down-hearted.

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