They met at a bowling alley in Northern Kentucky.
Her high school sweetheart played for the Bengals. They’d winced through JuCo towns in Kansas and practice squads in Missouri until he ended up covering kicks along the Licking and Ohio rivers. Once you make it, you want to make more. That means dumping your long-time girlfriend.
Maybe it was because she was blind and grew up on a farm. Maybe it was because she was unemployed. Either way, she was alone now. Six weeks of sitting without deliverance and she took a bus, sight unseen, to a bowling alley across the bridge.
****
An adoptee from Cleveland with a cocaine habit and a GI father who returned from World War II but never recovered from being one of the only Jews at Bastogne. Life before her was flooded basement apartments and stolen vending machine sandwiches and flipping kielbasa for $2.65 an hour. Halfway house cigarettes, skipping from gutter to gutter.
She needed a partner. He didn’t have one. He said bowling is golf for poor people, which made her laugh and him blush and the rest of the league snicker at the two broke and broken Midwesterners in the suburbs. They fell in love under the glow of a Cincinnati skyline. The rust had not yet taken hold.
****
I tell you all this—my brothers, my niece, anyone else who intuits how it might end for me—because they were happy once. And like so many love stories, their happiness peaked early, too early.
Just before the peak, though, came a child. Born in Cincinnati the last time the Bengals made a playoff run. He grew up sad, because they grew up sad. And now his mom is dead and his father drinks every day but he got out, away, lives elsewhere, sees his dad once or twice a year, where they go bowling and don’t talk much.
Just look at broad alleys like boulevards as the lights shine and pins crash.
Scott Gannis is a former asbestos abatement professional from Minneapolis and the author of Very Fine People (Atlatl, 2020). He tweets @scootergannis