I have always loved bowling. I have my own ball. As does Robbi. And yet we bowl so seldom these days. I was so pleased when I learned that my company was throwing a bowling baby shower for colleague Jen. We brought the kids along. It was high time that they learned the pleasure of hurling balls at hapless pins.

Knowing that my children were watching, I did my best to model proper bowling technique. The secret: success has nothing to do with grip or approach or even aim. It’s all about the attitude.

After the tutorial had ended, I whispered Swanson bowling secrets into Kato’s lucky young ears.

I showed him the moves that would make him great.

And then, as every parent must at some point, I let him go. To test his own fortune in the big bad world.

His approach was sound.

His confidence was legendary. Like Bruce Willis walking away from the burning car with practiced nonchalance just before it bursts into a large orange fireball, he didn’t even have to watch his own mastery unfold.

Which is lucky, given that, over the course of the evening, he knocked down precisely zero pins.

Nevertheless, I celebrated his first attempt with the good old, time-tested Swanson clan father-to-son post-bowling ritual.

Note, this ritual gets much more difficult as time passes.

Which is, it suddenly occurs to me, why dad and I haven’t bowled together in such a long time.

To read the official accounting of the NCSDO bowling outing as reported with wit and flair by the wonderful Erica Ashton, click here.