It’s New Years in the land of the new age otherwise known as the Wesak festival. In many traditions the first full moon in Taurus is the most auspicious time of year for setting your intentions for the coming year, theoretically the energy for the coming year comes down at this time and if you can catch the tail of the comet you’re intentions become an expression of the universal law. If you have a wish for the coming year, today around 3pm is the time to wish it, that is when the moon crests. As always, dear friends, careful what you wish for, and how you wish for it, for you shall surely have it. Choose your language carefully in the spirit of the phrases, “do no harm” & “in the best of all possible ways.” How it comes to you is just as important as what is coming.

Well, it’s early Tuesday am and I have to get ready for work. Last night was awards night at bowling, which I did not expect. There was a huge spread of roast beef, chicken wings, and other tasty treats. As we came in fourth we got to split the fourth place pot, my share of which was seventy dollars. That’s major manna from heaven this month. Then with special individual prizes for various things, my cash take swelled to eighty-one. Vanessa was informed that our team was disliked for some reason, ah high school thy social conditioning is pandemic. She thought it was because she is a slow bowler. Maybe she’s just too pretty and too much fun. The owner of the bar did gift her her bowling ball, so the green-eyed monster could be balking at that factoid.

Maybe I am the black sheep with my perceived aloofness, which slides slowly towards raucous Scotsmen as the evening progresses. Maybe it’s Hannah with her voluminous profanity and in your face grandstanding, a bleach-haired Madonna loving crazy. Eric hasn’t been bowling with us long enough to register, but he could be hated as the ringer I suppose. Maybe it’s the fact that we are not the best bowlers, but consistently all show up and beat our averages, a fact which allows mediocre bowlers to hold the number one spot in the league for weeks. As Jo said, “hate is a strong word.” Eric opined, “Awe fuck um, I didn’t come here to make friends, I came here to bowl.” Competition you do draw forth the best in human nature.

In the late forties and early fifties my mother was a regular bowler. I have a newspaper clipping of her high score for the week. My father made extra money as a pinsetter. He would hop between lanes and manually set the pins for a few dollars per lane per night. As their lives progressed my dad went into the Marine Core and left, my mother went to beauty school and opened a salon with some friends, she was part owner of a successful business and did well for herself. She continued to bowl. When she married my father, after the Korean War, she sold her stake in the business & bought a brand new black VW bug. They moved from Wisconsin and began their lives as world travelers, those are stories for another day (but to give you a taste I was born in Garoka New Guinea); today we tell the tale of return.

In their early sixties my parents retired to our family farm, moving back to Wisconsin from St. Louis. They began to reconnect with their past and my mother discovered to her professed horror, that those same women she had bowled with in her youth were still bowling in the same bowling alley, smoking the same cigarettes, telling the same stories. My mother had had a life, which at times was filled with adventure, and these women had managed to project their past into their future along the rut that forms in between the polished wood, with its painted on diamonds, and the magical ball return.

Vanessa too is a world traveler, who lived in China for a time teaching English there. She’s a practicing architect who just returned from a march on Washington – the result of her awakening political consciousness. Vanessa is many things, but slow is not one of them.