I know that this doesn’t have to do with video gaming, but it is gaming related so I’m going with it.<\/p>\n

Today I started to take apart our pool table.<\/p>\n

My father-in-law bought this pool table from Montgomery Wards in 1975 making the pool table only slightly younger than me.\u00a0 For years it stayed in his basement where he, my wife and my brother-in-law would play pool.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 So then it was offered to us and we accepted.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Upon arriving here, I put it back together until today, when I disassembled it, probably for the last time.<\/p>\n

Despite having my own pool table, I am terrible at pool.\u00a0 Far, far better than Linda, but still, pretty bad.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In fact, the only time I would ever show any improvement was when Led Zeppelin came on the radio in the student union.\u00a0 Not sure why that mattered, but my game improved nonetheless and if it didn’t, hey, it’s Zeppelin on the radio.\u00a0 It’s hard to get upset at that.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Well, as it turned out, I had a pretty crappy game of physics too.\u00a0 Neither got better over the years, to my continual disappointment.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I still enjoyed playing though, well, as much as one can enjoy anything they constantly lose at.\u00a0 Really, it was never about the pool, it was about just hanging out and having fun.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

In the end though, it wasn’t a lack of free time that did in the pool table, but practicality.\u00a0 The pool table takes up one of the largest rooms in the basement.\u00a0 My office takes up a room that Linda has always had an eye towards turning into a spare bedroom.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Suffice it to say, that didn’t happen.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I always thought it wansn’t possible for my game to get any worse, but I can assure you, it is entirely possible.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 For years it stayed in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=831"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1700,"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831\/revisions\/1700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}