CROSSROADS

Fifty-one years ago, Ed Miller spoke. He didn’t speak standing at a podium in a crowded auditorium. He spoke sitting down, in a smoked-filled bowling alley, to five teenagers, in front of lane 20. Ed’s speech was brief. He spoke only long enough to utter three one-syllable words in a graveled, Brandoesque voice.

“Don’t get old,” he said.

Competitive league bowling was all the rage when my friends and I joined an adult league. We were still in high school. The grown men wore slacks and monogrammed bowling shirts. We wore bell bottom blue jeans and T-shirts. The adults were annoyed. We were cool. The nights we won they grumbled about those damn kids. When we lost, they wore smiles of satisfaction believing that order had been restored.

Ed Miller was the worst bowler in the league. If they gave a trophy for futility, Ed would have won in a landslide. He had deep-set humorless eyes. His ill-fitting attire made him look wider and shorter than he really was. He always sat at the edge of the bench closest to the rack: silent and stoic. He stared out at the pins seeming to be contemplating 10 personal tragedies. When his turn came, he’d limp to the rack, pick up the ball and, without aiming, take four short uneven steps and, instead of rolling the ball, drop it with a loud thud. It took an eternity to hit the pins. He never seemed as interested in the outcome as he was resigned to it.

We were playing Ed’s team the night he spoke. It was late in the season. If we won all three games, we’d clinch first place in the league. Ed occupied his usual spot at the edge of the bench. We won the first two games by comfortable margins. The third game was close. Due in large part to Ed missing a one pin spare in the last frame, we eked out a victory. My teammates and I were backslapping and trash-talking when Ed looked up and, to no one in particular, said those three little words. “What did that old man say?” one of my teammates asked.

“He said, ‘Don’t get old,’” I replied.

We looked at each other and dismissed Ed with a shrug. He was just a sore loser throwing shade on our parade, I thought. We went on celebrating. From the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of him as he struggled with his ball bag. I couldn’t help but stare as he fought to scale the two steps to the main level. I turned away for a moment and when I looked again, I saw the back of his head as he limped out the door.

When he didn’t show up the following week, I assumed he was still suffering from the sting of the previous week’s defeat. I asked one of his teammates where Ed was. I was told he fell at home and broke his hip. “He wasn’t a young man,” his friend said. I never saw Ed Miller again.

Through the years, Ed’s words have nagged at me. What is old? Was old a journey or a destination? Would it happen gradually or all at once? Would I know when it happened to me?

Recently, I was walking off the 18th green when one of the guys in our group said he had to hurry home because it was bowling night. Immediately my mind returned to those days when the kids battled the men for pots of cash and bragging rights. Ed Miller’s ghost returned as well. This time I had an epiphany. Maybe the lesson was less about getting old and more about staying young. If we weren’t so cocky that night long ago and Ed wasn’t so sad, his words might have been different. Instead of a dire warning, he might have said, “Stay young, my friends, as long as you can.”

Wisdom isn’t the only thing that comes with age; it can also bring regrets. If Ed Miller and I could have parted with a smile and handshake that night, our victory over the men would have been so much sweeter.