Monday, June 30, 2003 5:56:38 PM Joe Coluccio

"Just take three steps and throw the ball" Advice given me by my mother the month before she adopted a four step approach.

The guy was carrying two bowling pins. He wore a checkerboard shirt that would have made a NASCAR enthusiast glad and shorts that were cut off just above his hairy knees. He had dark gleaming hair and a look and style that would have been a lot less noticed in a Tex-Mex border town.

I was stopped ten automobiles and a delivery truck before the traffic light. The wooden pins, white lacquer gleaming with a red pheasant ring around the neck, looked like they were a part of his hands. "A bowling pin man." I thought and possibly said aloud over the din of a cassette tape of a mystery novel, strangely enough set in San Antonio and environs. I flashed on the Mariachis boisterous and joyous in the Mercado, spirit and odors that I had spent a mere couple hours exploring before touristing on to the Alamo and the River Walk. I know I shouldn't, but I take these sightings as signs or as some kind of omen, or at the very least some of God's peculiar sense of humor dealing with synchronicity and the universe that inhabits me.

By now my perverse organ of imagination was in full swing. 'What,' I wondered, 'was a this Latin Loner, his name very possibly, Jesus, doing carrying two perfect bowling pins down a street in Etna, Pennsylvania?' Could it be some sign of the apocalypse approaching? A flawed interpretation, I concluded, a herald of the apocalypse would at least include an elephant trumpeting and some of the glib glossed twisted tongue of Ernest Angely. People who are chaste and spiritually adept go around with bumper stickers that say 'When the rapture comes I will be transported straight to heaven.' Leaving me, I figure, right in the driverless path of their 1986 Crown Victoria. There is something sadly wrong with this apochrafilled Christian notion.

The light changed and the old bowling alley on the side street that leads to the Fleming Bridge came into view. Two old men were sitting at a card table in the front of the building. Playing cards, relaxing. The front door to the lanes was propped open. I suppose for easier access should someone want a souvenir of the seven-ten split that they just made. Aha! Here was another answer to this fine conundrum posited just a few minutes past. The inside of the building looked dark and cool. I imagined Don Diego, magnificent and masked, speaking Castilian Spanish with a proper lithsp, carrying ten pins, secreted in the palms of his hand two at a time to a building three short blocks away to distribute among the poor bowl deprived citizens of Etna. Tax Free!

I tried as I moved across the river to the south banks of the Allegheny to make some sense of it all. But as usual, my suspicious and synchronous God is silent. Sends a delicious image and then has me toting up all manner of interpretation until my head is spinning and my nerves are a tingle.

One late afternoon we were all sitting around the office with nothing better to do than to swap stories about the evening before. One of the younger members of the crew described the previous evening to us. He had been out at a bar and had begun a mild bender that he hoped would turn to a full and satisfying pain the next day. Soon everyone was buying everyone else drinks. The crowd grew and when it got to his turn, he explained, that the round after he clicked his soggy fingers in his spongy mind cost close to sixty dollars. One of the “revenge of the nerd’s” employees from a software company that inhabited the premises with us rounded the corner. He was moved to join us. "Wow," he said, a living monument to pocket protector and taped glasses, "Sixty Dollars!" We looked up at him. "To spend that kind of money you'd have to go bowling." He gave a twittering laugh and left.

Indeed!