I know that this doesn’t have to do with video gaming, but it is gaming related so I’m going with it.

Today I started to take apart our pool table.

My father-in-law bought this pool table from Montgomery Wards in 1975 making the pool table only slightly younger than me.  For years it stayed in his basement where he, my wife and my brother-in-law would play pool.  When Linda and I were dating, we played on this table many times, under the fluorescent lights of the basement, sneaking kisses in between the constant parental interruptions that they conducted under the guise of needing food from the basement pantry.

When my father-in-law decided that he didn’t want the pool table any more, he offered it to my brother-in-law, presumably because Dan played more pool, but more realistically because Dan has always been offered everything first, but being that Dan was in Oregon, shipping a slate pool table 3000 miles from upstate New York wasn’t going to happen.  So then it was offered to us and we accepted.  So, my father-in-law took it apart, drove it to our house in Virginia and put it together in the basement that he, Linda and myself renovated where it stayed for a few years until he took it apart again, only this time for it to be moved by Linda and I to our current house in Georgia.  Upon arriving here, I put it back together until today, when I disassembled it, probably for the last time.

Despite having my own pool table, I am terrible at pool.  Far, far better than Linda, but still, pretty bad.  My college roommate Dennis and I used to play all the time, both in college, and then on Thursday nights when he moved to Virginia, but I never seemed to get any better.  In fact, the only time I would ever show any improvement was when Led Zeppelin came on the radio in the student union.  Not sure why that mattered, but my game improved nonetheless and if it didn’t, hey, it’s Zeppelin on the radio.  It’s hard to get upset at that.

In college, people used to joke with me about having such a crappy game of pool because I was a physics major and pool is all physics.  Well, as it turned out, I had a pretty crappy game of physics too.  Neither got better over the years, to my continual disappointment.  See, I’m not good at any sport, not a one, and pool, being a kind of non-sport sport, I thought it could be the one sport I’d end up being good at.  My dad worked his way through college hustling pool, so my hopes were high that genetics would eventually show me some favors, but it never happened.  I still enjoyed playing though, well, as much as one can enjoy anything they constantly lose at.  Really, it was never about the pool, it was about just hanging out and having fun.  Talking comics with Dennis after hitting up the Starbucks on a Thursday night, or sneaking a kiss with Linda before her mom came down looking for pasta sauce.

Once the pool table was at our house in Virginia, Linda and I played a fair amount, but that all dropped off when the kids entered the picture.  Simply put, kids take up a lot of your time, so when we did have free time, pool wasn’t at the top of the “Ways To Spend Our Free Time” list.  As the kids got older, we would occasionally play a game here and there, but usually the kids either required more attentiont than we could give while playing a game of pool, or we just had other, more important things to do.

In the end though, it wasn’t a lack of free time that did in the pool table, but practicality.  The pool table takes up one of the largest rooms in the basement.  My office takes up a room that Linda has always had an eye towards turning into a spare bedroom.  This fact combined with the fact that my toy collection has more than outgrown my office caused Linda to come up with the idea of taking apart the pool table and moving my office to the pool table room.  There, my toys could live in a larger space, my son could get my desk and I could add some chairs and a couch and turn the large room into an office/leisure area, an area I have since dubbed The Man Lounge.  My old office could be turned into a bedroom, which, when combined with the full bathroom we’re currently renovating would not only provide a nice sleeping space for guests, but up the resale value of the house.  When presented with such hardcore practicality, as well as a room called The Man Lounge, it was hard to justify keeping a pool table that we never use.

Today the kids had a half day, and they wanted to play in the basement, so I took the opportunity to take the pool table apart.  Before I started though, I played one last game thinking that maybe if some long lost mutant poolshark power had manifested without my knowledge, it might offer the table a last minute reprieve.  Suffice it to say, that didn’t happen.  In fact, my newly developed astigmatism makes it even harder to play as when I try to line up shots, I end up looking over my glasses and when I can look through my glasses, the curvature of the lenses makes everything crooked.  I always thought it wansn’t possible for my game to get any worse, but I can assure you, it is entirely possible.

In the end, the pool table will be replaced with a foosball table (I absolutely love foosball) which will no doubt get used as much as the pool table did, however it looks cool and has a much smaller footprint thereby making it somewhat immune to issues of practicality.  The pool table will be stored in the basement, maybe to be resurrected some day, most likely to be moved to some other basement of some other family.  If that is the case, I can only hope that the new family has as much fun with the table as we did, and that the conversations, and kisses, that take place around that table become as treasured a set of memories for them as they did for me.