How to Hold a Bowling Ball

Or Making work with a heavy heart

1. Five days after the election results were officially announced, I was in a bowling alley in Catskill, New York with my wife and stepson. Outside, a light rain had started to fall, and the temperature was dropping, but inside a heated competition was underway as we battled it out in a best-of-three tournament in lane 5. We’d arrived at a weird time of day; the place was largely empty save for the final frames of a family birthday party taking place on the opposite end of the building. The concession stand was vacant, the grill scrubbed clean.

2. Every bowling alley I’ve ever been to is a throwback to another time. Stepping in through the glass doors, you’re almost immediately confronted by the smell of a deodorizing, antifungal mist. There’s often the vague trace of mildew in the faded carpet you walk on to get to your assigned lane, and sometimes the after-scent of pepperoni pizza and stale French fries. None of these are pleasant aromas, but somehow the combination of them immediately injects the experience with the flavor of adventure. You have left your present concerns behind you in the potholed parking lot. When you take your street shoes off and retrieve the worn pair of lace-ups the person behind the rental counter offers you, you are officially disrobing yourself of where you came from.

3. And then you walk over to the rack where the bowling balls are and decide which one will be yours.

4. They’re all heavy, those bowling balls—that part’s unavoidable—each fashioned with just three holes into which your own fingers will have to nest for the brief time before you aim and release the behemoth down the length of the parquet in an attempt to overturn as many pins as you can. Inside the bowling hall in Catskill, NY, I found myself gravitating toward the smallest ball in the rack, a bright pink orb with the number 6 on it (presumably 6 pounds) that seemed designed for speed. But the three holes in the ball were way too small for my fingers—I could fit only the tips of them in, which meant I didn’t have a strong enough grip, which meant I didn’t have a grip at all. I put the pink ball back.

5. Then I moved up a size to #8, and here there were a view finger hole size variations. I carried that ball over, and returned back to the rack for a backup. There were no #10s, so I moved up to the #12. The holes there were sizable, like deep pockets. Plenty of room for my digits. I brought the ball close to my sternum and carried it like I would an especially unwieldy armchair. I actually didn’t think I’d use it all—way too heavy. We keyed up the scoreboard screen, and began the game.

6. What I’m thinking about as I type this is how, in the past few weeks, I’ve experienced a downshift in my creative output. Like I’m not sure where—or if—there’s another poem coming down the pike. Everything about that kind of work feels heavy right now, almost too big to lift. Whether this has to do with the election or the onset of cold weather or the kitchen demo that’s currently underway at our house, who knows. But the experience I’m sitting in is kind of like that unwieldy armchair of a bowling ball I carried to the lane—it’s just there, a weight. It doesn’t feel like it can push much of anything down the pipeline.

7. Of course, there are a million things bombarding that pipeline at the moment, or for that matter ANY moment, and many of them are distracting, disruptive, and even destructive. So I’m recognizing that while the poems may not be racing off the page, it a different kind of creative work to sort out what I can let through the sieve of my attention, and what needs to be kept out of the cake batter. (Excuse my metaphor-mixing…sometimes this is the only way to do it.) There are things that I do to help my decision making—asking myself if whatever-it-is is helpful or hurtful, if I feel invited toward reflection or pressured to reactivity, if I am awakened into awareness or dulled into despair. I remember, in these moments of bombardment, that I have to give myself time to answer these questions, because these questions demand discernment and most definitely demand self-care.

8. In the lane, no matter how I hold it, a bowling ball is an unwieldy fit. It’s not something I’m used to carrying. There are very few things besides picking up a pair of tweezers or using a Q-tip that I restrict my grip to a few fingers. But this is what the inventors of this game conjured as the tool to do the trick, and as I step into place for my turn, I try to imagine the ball is simply an extension of my arm, a heavy appendage but an appendage nonetheless. And it turns out that the ball I’d least imagined would work—the bulkiest and heaviest of the lot, the #12—is the one that actually feels the best for what I need it to do. Because what it does is slow me down to the speed of its weight; instead of running up to the throw line and hucking the thing down the pike, I take measured steps, giving my body more time to acclimate to what it’s carrying, familiarizing myself with this bonus body and orienting myself to the task.

9. And now I'm thinking about the seven-and-a-half span of years since my father died. How my grief at losing him was foreign and unwelcome and an unwieldy heft, too…until it wasn’t. Until it began to companion me, and I to companion it. In the introduction to my collection, Grief Becomes You, I describe loss as a “feral animal. It holds my arm in its mouth, biting or not biting, depending how much I resist.” Over the years, I’ve learned to hold this loss in my arms, and over time it’s stopped feeling like resistance and more like gratitude. Is it any less heavy than it used to be? I’m not sure. But perhaps grief and gratitude are the twin measures of love. Certainly, there are days full of the weight of my father’s absence, when I desperately want him back. But that absence, that loss, that grief, is part of my body now. I hold it no matter how heavy it gets, because it’s what I need to do. Because holding it also feels, in a way that might be impossible to explain, like being held.

10. All the way down the long parquet lane, the ten pins I’m meant to be knocking down look a little like meerkats, poking their heads out in the savannah. As I prepare the launch of #12, I think about how a finished poem can be a lot like those meerkat-pins. It’s the culmination of the windup effort, a lovely tangible object waiting on the other end of my labors. In a way, the pins represent the perfect scenario of creative output—given the right aim, the right strength, the right conditions, they’ll go tumbling all at once, and you’ll get the high score. But first, you’ve got to carry the ball, and it’s full of gravity. And to think it’s a weight you can simply catapult down the lane is an exercise in wishful thinking (and possibly a shoulder sprain). No, for this kind of carrying, you need your whole body, and you cannot let the meerkats distract you. In bowling, in writing, in grief. You have to carry the ball in the way it asks to be carried. You have to use every available handhold, and downshift your assumptions about speed and force and velocity and what might be there on the other end. You have to stay with the weight of it. You have to love the weight of it. This is what I practiced in lane 5 on a late Sunday afternoon in Catskill, NY, bowling three games of 10 frames with my wife and stepson. And this is what I want to keep practicing, with every elusive poem, with every tender grief, in this time of bombardments and overwhelm. How will I carry what needs to be carried? What will I dare to lift, knowing the heaviness it might bear?