aged sportsman

Have you ever played bocce ball? I'd never even heard of it when B.'s sister announced that that's what she wanted to do for her birthday. We were all to gather at a local Italian restaurant-cum-bocce ball court, play for a couple hours and then have dinner.

I had to look it up and watch a couple instructional videos before I was sure that it was something that both B. and I, neither of whom can move about with any degree of alacrity any more, could physically do. Most of the instructions bogged down in details of the scoring and turn-taking rules, but I figured others could worry about that and tell us whose turn it was.

The playing itself was very simple, and I described it to B. as like the accuracy round of Golfimbul as we play it at Mythcon, except instead of hitting a doll's head with a bat at a stuffed bunny, with your hand you set a ball rolling along the ground at another ball.

The target is a small metal ball whose name I picked up as Il postino or some Italian movie title like that,¹ except it was easier to think of it as the Golden Snitch. The balls you roll at it are bigger and heavy and made of ceramic I think, about the size of croquet balls, not that I have any memories of croquet less than half a century old.

Whoever comes closest to the Snitch wins, and an annoying number of our games (we played in teams of two) began with one of the opposing players rolling a single lucky ball that nestled up right by the Snitch, and the rest of the game consisted of an exercise in finding out how many other balls they would win by.

The game is played on a long court, maybe 10-15 yards in length, and while it's not slippery to walk on, it's almost frictionless as far as the balls are concerned, and most of my early rolls went right up against the backboard. I never quite got to the point of transferring to this hand movement my halfway-decent abilities at cue-striking on the much smaller field of billiards, because it turns out that the best action in bocce ball comes when you hit one of the balls that's already there and knock it out of the way.

The billiards master among our party turned out to be my niece Beth², who was ruthless and skilled at hitting just about anything.

Meantime, as we were gently exercising on our reserved courts, the proprietors, who remember are also an Italian restaurant, were plying our party of 14 with enormous quantities of appetizers: fried calamari, crab cakes, bread, and cheese pizza, set out on the adjacent counter. The drinks menu included a lot of items like lemonade or ginger beer mixed with vodka, so they taste like the other thing but are firmly alcoholic.

When our time was up, we moved to an adjacent picnic table inside this cavernous space and dined on the contents of large serving platters passed around: pasta with meat marinara sauce, pasta with alfredo sauce, chicken milanese, and beef marsala. Basic Italian food, but quite good, and, most importantly, efficiently served. They got 5 stars on my Yelp review for that.

An interesting and unusual way for us to spend a birthday party.

1. It's actually il pallino, which I only mention to prevent people from telling me that. I could look it up, you know, and I did. It's just funnier to record how I got it wrong.
2. Beth is related to me exactly in the same way as Elizabeth Longford was related to Lord Dunsany. I'm her husband's mother's sister's husband, got it?