The Life of a Bowling Ball

This was probably one of the first things I ever wrote. I was part of a writing group in high school at my local Barnes and Noble book store, and we would write little things like this. Embarrassingly, I was on the bowling team in High school, so bowling was a big part of my life.

My name is Ball, Bowling Ball that is, and my sole job in life is to roll down a 60’ long, 40” wide wooden lane. Now the lanes where I am used are a fake, they are made of plastic made to look like wood. The lane is oiled heavily over the top. When my owner arrives he takes me out of my home, the bowling bag, and places me in a plastic contraption called the ball return, it is part of a system for returning me when I am thrown, a process we will get to in a minute. After he puts on his shoes and the lanes turn on, something more I will get to in a minute, he throws me for the first frame, now I will tell you that throwing me so I don’t end up in the channel is no easy thing, he must stand just three boards or so after the last dot on the approach (that area where the bowlers walk) and twist his hand a quarter turn to the left and I curve around and hit my personal friends, the pins. Now here is where things get interesting. I am sent up the ball wheel and into the ball lift whence I am sent back to the ball return mentioned earlier. My friends the pins however, get shook in the cross conveyor tray to the pin wheel. The pin wheel is made so all the pins are arranged narrow end down, these pins then ascend into the turn pan which gets them turned around so they can set arranged again in the turret where the pins are held until they are placed on the stage, where they sit ready for someone to hit them with me. Now the machine that does all this is quite extraordinary, it has 1 motor but runs the entire operation with 9 belts. The turret, that thing I mentioned earlier that arranges the pins and sets them in the stage? It also has a way of determining if there are any new pins to arrange or not. It can stop at three different levels, to determine if there are any pins to re-set or to just clear the stage and get ready for another throw. Although from my vantage point in the ball return it looks like the pins are packed together quite tightly, that is not so, the pins are 12 inches apart! Now as all the above are going on I an whizzing down the ball lift which churns me up and back into the ball return for me to await another throw, and if my owner is on top of things, that will come quickly. After my owner is done bowling (sometimes he doesn’t do too good either) I am cleaned and returned into my home, the bowling bag, to sit quietly for one week until I do it all over again.