I’ve found that I have a tendency to form opinions about people I’ve never met. Not like everyday people, but like actors, or athletes, or politicians. Of course, it goes that way. We see them from afar and gather glimpses of information about them. And our opinions are formed.
I do this with historical figures too. There are many. I’m not too crazy about Benedict Arnold. I have an all-out vehemence toward Adolph Hitler.
And then there is Henry VIII. I’ve never liked that guy. Albeit, I don’t know a great deal about him, other than he went through wives like sugar cubes at a horse track. He had six in all. “King Henry VIII, to six wives he was wedded. One died, one survived, two divorced, two beheaded.”
I always have a picture of Henry VIII in my head, sitting there in his too-tight royal garb, huge turkey leg in his fist, taking bites, spewing food around the room as he barks out commands. “Off with her head!”
It is typically unpleasant. But today, I learned a little fact about him that made me — somehow — like him a tiny bit more. It was on this date, in 1520, that Henry VIII ordered bowling alleys at Whitehall. I never knew Henry liked to bowl.
Bowling goes way back in history. There were artifacts found in an ancient Egyptian tomb that suggest the game may have been played as early as 3200 B.C.E. Or a game very much like bowling. And it kept rolling along.
We can look back in history and see a high prevalence of activity in 14th century Germany. That is when the law got into things because of the concerns over bowling and gambling. As it went, those pesky peasants were placing such large bets they would go into debt over the game. So, in 1325, two German cities — Berlin and Cologne — passed a law about how much a person could bet on a bowling match. I think it was a lot, about the equivalent of a dollar today.
But bowling always seems to be the red-headed stepchild, doesn’t it? A few decades later, in 1361, bowling was completely banned in England. Good old King Edward III thought the game was distracting his merry men from archery practice. Yes, the male citizens needed to keep their skills sharp for war. I’m not sure if the lanes were quiet or not, because history takes us forward about a hundred years.
Henry VI reversed the bowling ban in 1455. So London was back in business and home to several all-weather bowling alleys. Another 100 years, and that’s when Henry VIII came back into the picture and passed more legislation. I don’t know which wife he was on, but in 1541, he declared that only the wealthy could bowl. Of course, this worked in his good favor, as he had those nice lanes at London’s Whitehall Palace.
Why the big whoop? Well, for quite some time, I was a little bowling ally rat. You see, my father was a man of many talents. He was very intelligent, for one. Kind, to a fault. Generous. Peaceful. An incredibly hard worker. And? He was a mediocre bowler. Average, at best. But he loved it. Absolutely, positively loved the game of bowling. And on Sundays, after church and family breakfast, he lugged his seven kids down to the McCook Lanes on Keowee Drive in Dayton. And we would bowl our little hearts out.
Just thinking about it now bring a great sense of joy. None of us kids were very good either. But we sure did love it, by assimilation. It was a big, old, whopping good time whenever we’d go to lanes, despite the occasional temper tantrums when the ball wouldn’t go the way we wanted. Our hearts and our minds in the gutter. But oh. The cumulative joy.
Which brings me to this. Life is far and wide. Right now, our times are troubled. But for a little piece of it, I found a little patch of happiness, all because King Henry VIII put bowling lanes in at his palace, and a childhood memory came springing forward. As simple as that may seem, I think, now more than ever, it is important for us to find our triumphs, our delights, our pieces of glee, in whatever it is that makes us happy. Even for a moment.
For our entire lives are made of moments. Like now. Like this one.
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“Happiness is a direction, not a place.”
— Sydney J. Harris
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“Happiness consists more in conveniences of pleasure that occur everyday than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom.”
— Benjamin Franklin
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“Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.”
— Denis Waitley
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Rolling wives’ heads, or bowling balls.
