I’ve always loved bowling alleys. As a kid, there was always a thrill of excitement whenever a friend had his or her birthday party at a bowling alley. As soon as you walked in through the grimy glass doors the sensory assault was on. The sweet smells of steamed hot dogs, buttered popcorn, and old tobacco; the flashing lights and electronic chirps of the video arcade nestled in the corner of the building; the laughter coming from the gaggles of middle-aged bowlers, mostly men, as they joked and lobbed playful insults back and forth, bellies heaving under polyester team shirts with big, pointy, cardboard collars; and in the background, always, the deep rumbling of the balls as they careened down the alley, simultaneously sliding and rolling, and ending in that delicious woody crash.

What’s really great about bowling alleys, though, is the sense of order that governs all this chaos. The first thing you must do when you decide to bowl is remove your shoes, as if you’ve entered a holy shrine, a mosque, a temple. And why not? Like other places of worship or sanctuary, a bowling alley seeks to bring order to chaos. Think of it: 16 pounds of rotating demolition hurtling toward 10 defenseless pins. The result? A deafening explosion of wood and beer-induced whoots, all multiplied by the number of lanes in the alley and the number of pints in each bowler’s belly.

Unless, of course, you're the pins...

But all this wonderful stomp and roar is strictly governed and confined. The wooded lanes, for one, straight as Roman roads, are polished to a sheen. The gutters, like moats, ensure that any and all destruction is penned within the roughly 3 1/2 feet of alley. And all the while, the men, women, and children dutifully record their results—transforming their 10 rounds of bottlenecked mayhem into a civilized grid of numbers and blackened triangles. So you see, bowling alleys, looked at through the right prism, can be beautiful places.

Unless, of course, you’re the pins.

Q: So what is this blog, if not the longest and most lyrical blog about bowling in the history of the English language?

A: This blog is a time capsule. We are starting it with the hope that we’ll one day be able to look back on this pivotal point in our lives. It was a point arrived at as a result of our own choosing; a point that would reshape how we saw ourselves as spouses, as parents—as people. People don’t usually have the luxury of seeing such points coming. They’re usually bowled over by these moments of ecstasy or tragedy and spend the next few decades wondering: just what in the hell happened? So in case the Fates were pissed that we were stealing their thunder, we decided we’d try to appease them with an accurate, and possibly entertaining, account.

Like all time capsules, this blog is buried. It’s very deliberately stuffed beneath the other billions of pages of untold millions of blogs. It sits, unobtrusively, waiting for someone to find it—or not. It won’t apologize for having a ridiculously long opening entry, so don’t ask for one. It’s not even convinced that you, Dearest Readers, exist. You see, this blog isn’t written for you, although you’re perfectly welcome to it. It is written for us. It’s meant to be our time spent together checking in with each other. It’s supposed to be our time to remember, review, rethink, and rejoice in (or perhaps regret) the decisions we make along the way. We hope it will be the time we reconnect with each other, even as new adventures sweep us away from one day to the next.

It’s been a long time coming. The pins are reset. We’re ready for Next.

Ready For Next