Today is a day loaded with accidental alliteration.
I meet a friend in Lowell for a few hours of mayhem. We have been friends since old Miss
Gregg's English class in third grade at Wilkins Elementary School in Amherst,
New Hampshire. Miss Gregg was a
half-crazed poet with impeccable handwriting, and
I think she may have been a dwarf.
Cheryl, in addition to being a classmate, also lived up the street from
me, and our mothers were our Girl Scout Troop leaders. Between school, scouts, streets, and one
dwarf, Cheryl and I have been friends for a very long time.
We try to get together several times a year. Though we live less than an hour apart, we are in constant motion between our kids, our careers, and the general
circumstances of life in general.
Pathetic excuses, all of them, but when we see each other, sometimes
it's like we never left third grade.
Take today for example.
We start out with breakfast, choosing a small,
out-of-the-way Greek restaurant called Maria's run by a charming older woman
whose name is, no surprise, Maria. I get
stuck in ridiculous amounts of traffic trying to get there, and the twenty
minutes I leave for the thirteen minute trip turns out to be ten minutes short.
Note to self: Avoid the highway at all cost or you'll have to do advanced math in your head.
To make up for the lost time, we engage in triple overtime,
sitting and chatting long after the coffee and tea has been emptied and the
bill has been paid. We ask Maria if we
may leave one of our cars in her parking lot while we carouse around Lowell,
but she promises us they lock it with a chain around noontime. I move my car to a spot on the street, and
then we're off.
After a cross-city odyssey that includes cutting through my
old semi-stomping ground of Prince Spaghettiville (honestly a section of Lowell
-- Google it; I'm not lying) and travelling under the Spaghettiville Bridge, we roll out by
UMass Lowell to inspect the new buildings.
When I went there (one of my four colleges -- hey, don't judge me), I
was mainly on the West Campus, a series of old, cold, sad brick buildings that
housed the original Lowell Normal School in 1898, where they gave abnormal me a
degree in 1999.
We eventually spill onto the Boulevard, making an infamous
Massachusetts u-turn across several lanes of traffic so we can enter the
parking lot of the Brunswick Zone Bowling Alley. This is a ten-pin bowling facility, meaning
we're throwing the big balls down the alleys.
I'm used to candlepin bowling where you wail what is essentially a
pregnant bocce ball down a polished wooden alley at really teeny tiny skinny
little white sticks. Cheryl and I
immediately search for 8-pound (the lightest) bowling balls.
I start out with a gutter ball then roll a strike. It does little good, though, because I
already rolled a gutter ball. I end up
with a spare. I'll take it. I haven't embarrassed myself too
terribly. One other thing about ten-pin:
you only get two rolls down the alley, not three like candelpin. The other thing about ten-pin: Once you get
the hang of it, it's pretty easy to knock over something. Scores in ten-pin tend to average about 100
per game, well over twenty points differential from my average candlepin
scores.
We get the lane for an hour at cheap money, so we bowl
two-and-a-half strings. When we've
reached what will become our personal bests, we decide to pack it in. Cheryl bowls better, but I beat her in gutter
balls with seven or eight total on the day, not bad if I consider that I rolled
the ball fifty times.
Checking the clock, we discover that it is noontime
(somewhere, anyway) and head over to the restaurant/bar next door, JJ Boomers,
for a beer. We're both driving (eventually), so we
limit ourselves, but we talk and talk and talk just like we did after breakfast
earlier when we stayed and stayed and stayed at Maria's. Mostly when we bitch, we're bitching about
our jobs (we are both teachers in different districts), but luckily we're not
mostly bitching.
To be honest, the day has been completely stuffed with
laughter, as always. It's amazing the
shit we find to laugh about, especially after decades and decades and decades
of troublemaking we did as neighbors, scout-mates, classmates, and friends.
Eventually we make our way back through Spaghettiville, back
past Lowell Cemetery, back under the "Welcome to Spaghettiville"
Bridge, back to my car. Good thing I
moved it to the street because Maria's aged better-half is locking the chain
across the now-empty lot as we arrive.
We greeted with real hugs, but we part with air ones, me pantomiming a
hug across the car so Cheryl can get back on her way to New Hampshire, and I
can roll the dice and get back on the highway toward home.
Somewhere in all of this, though, the epiphany hits us that
all day we have been experiencing alliteration: Breakfast, Bridge, Boulevard,
Brunswick, Bowling, Boomers, and Beer.
Apparently, we are teachers to the core (not the Common Core
but our own cores). We may be on April
break, but we still manage to fit in curriculum work when we notice the
alliteration. Good thing we're both trained profession educators -- Otherwise, we'd just be a
couple of old geeks who get together for alliterative misadventures and mayhem a
couple of times a year to relive our Glory Days.
Miss Gregg would be proud.
Oh, who am I kidding? She'd have
a damn stroke, just like she did when she had us as students. It's okay, though. She was a tiny wisp of a woman. We could
totally tag-team it and take her out.
(PS. Happy anniversary, Cheryl and Alfredo. Love you guys!)
(PS. Happy anniversary, Cheryl and Alfredo. Love you guys!)
