Apple Bowling and Other Intergenerational Sports

My dad taught me that cultivating community can send a beautiful chain reaction down the generations.

Welcome! I’m Lisa Sibbett and this is The Auntie Bulletin, a newsletter for people who are significantly involved in helping to raise other people’s children. You can read my archive here. If you appreciate reading this newsletter, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for $5 a month or $50 for the year. You can also support my work by “liking” this post below. It only requires a click on the little heart icon, and it helps other people find my Substack.

Now Let’s Get To It

A few years back, my dad and his two little across-the-street neighbors (today aged 7 and 9) invented an ever-evolving, always hilarious game called apple bowling. It’s become a late-summer after-dinner tradition in their neighborhood, and when I visited my parents a few weeks ago, they were out there apple bowling every evening. I don’t usually play, but instead take advantage of everyone else’s engagement in the game to do some needed introverting. As I listened to the laughter wafting up to my window, I started thinking about how much my parents taught me about building community, being truly welcoming, and connecting with and supporting other people’s kids.

Tonight I called up my dad to remind me of the apple bowling rules of play.  

“It helps to have an apple tree,” he began. “Or get a bag of old or wormy apples. Then find a flat street –”

“A quiet flat street!” my mom called from the kitchen.

“A quiet flat street,” my dad agreed. “Or, but if cars come along occasionally that can be good too, because apples squished by cars add a new dimension to the field of play.” 

Don’t use the good apples — use the lost causes, like these ones that have already fallen from the tree and nobody will eat.

You can have as many players as you want for apple bowling – my dad can recall playing with as many as ten, including visiting extended family members, the kids across the street and their parents, and interested passersby. Players take turns rolling their apple down the middle of the street, aiming to roll their apple as far as possible without it leaving the roadway. (My dad reminded me that roads are designed to be slightly arched, with the highest point running down the middle so that rainwater drains off to either side). A roll that keeps your apple on the roadway is worth one point, while a roll that sends it off the street or hits the curb is worth zero. 

With each consecutive roll, the apples start to fall apart – especially if you throw overhand. But since an apple that’s “fairly compromised” tends to stay on the street better, there’s a strategy to managing your apple’s dissolution. Everyone plays, as my dad put it, “for as long as you can viably throw the remnants of your apples,” and the kids diligently keep score. 

Apple bowlers are always invited to riff on the basic structure of the game. My dad said it’s fun to have everyone bowl multiple apples at once, although then you can’t tell whose is whose. It’s okay to use other people’s apples, too. “The rules are very fluid,” he explained, “and you want everyone to experience success and laughter.” 

Boy, do they ever. Success and laughter are exactly what people experience when they’re around my dad. When I’m in my hometown, I routinely tell total strangers whose daughter I am and watch their faces light up.

My dad sometimes receives cute appreciations from small friends of his. This one is from a kid at my parents’ church whose family attended “surf camp,” an annual informal weeklong camping/surfing trip that my dad and his buddies put on for their kids, grandkids, and anyone else they can talk into coming.

My dad has always befriended everyone he meets, regardless of age or identity or politics¹ or life experience, treating them all like family and engaging them in exuberant shenanigans. There have often been people I hardly know at our house for the holidays, invited by my parents to come to where there’s warmth and family and food. (Well, my dad invites them and entertains them, and my mom feeds them and checks in about what’s going on in their lives). Because my parents raised six children, their house has spare bedrooms, and over time a changing cast of family, friends, and acquaintances have lived there rent-free – including me, once or twice. 

One person who lived with my parents for many years was my maternal grandmother, Jean. (She was utterly wonderful, but that’s a different topic). When her dementia and physical needs became too much for my parents to manage, Jean moved to a skilled care facility. Every Sunday after church for many years, my parents visited and led my grandma and other interested residents in singing hymns, accompanied either by another visiting couple on their guitars, or by the instrumental music on a portable CD player. After my grandma died, my parents continued leading the singing at the care facility for several more years. These days, they go (still every week) just to visit friends who live there. This is who raised me.

Anne Helen Peterson of the excellent Culture Study has been interviewing people (including me!) for her next book about consciously building community and friendship. In a recent newsletter, she shared a few things she’s learned so far. She wrote:

Most of the people I've interviewed who are deeply involved in their community -- or in the lives of someone they're not related to -- had showing up, even when it's not convenient modeled for them (and explicitly explained to them) throughout their childhoods. If you complained about having to go over to someone else's house to drop something off, if you didn't want to come to the dinner table because they'd invited someone you thought was weird, the messaging was explicit: this is what we do for other people.

If I’m the kind of person who prioritizes helping to raise and care for other people’s children, perhaps that’s because this kind of behavior has been modeled for me for as long as I’ve been alive. It’s been deeply embedded in my heart, mind, and body that this is what we do for other people. I assume that when people in my community need support, I will show up if I can, even when it’s not convenient; and I assume that when I need support, someone will show up for me. I trust people, which may be naive and sometimes gets me into trouble, but also buoys me and allows me to keep contributing to the communities around me. I can’t take credit for these traits in myself, because I learned them from my parents. And truly, they can’t take credit either, because they learned it from their parents.

Here’s who I think is actually awesome: people who didn’t learn habits of community-building and inclusivity from whoever raised them, but cultivate these habits anyway. Although I got lucky and was raised by exceedingly warm, kind, and community-oriented people, I also know people who make everyone feel like they belong, who are skillful community-builders and routinely demonstrate deep generosity – and who definitely didn’t learn those skills from their parents.

And the existence of such “self-taught” community-builders and connection-makers suggest that these skills are not only heritable, but also learnable. One person who starts cultivating community in a new way could send a chain reaction right on down the generations. 

Regardless of how we have kids in our lives – whether they’re our own children, our friends’ or family member’s children, or the children of total strangers – we can and should model the kind of interdependent, welcoming communities that we want for them, and for their children as well. This is why building community is a radical political act. By showing up for families, Aunties and our ilk show the way to a better, more just and loving world.

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Links and Tips of the Week

Sandwich grilling tip of the week. Use mayonnaise instead of butter when you grill a sandwich. I had always used butter, but I heard that many restaurants use mayo (restaurant people, confirm or deny in the comments). I made the switch and never looked back. Mayo is spreadable straight from the fridge, and it holds in moisture but crisps up wonderfully. It also has a higher smoke point than butter so your sandwich doesn’t burn as easily.

xkcd comic of the week

New York Times article of the week (gift link). “For more than eight decades, the Slon family has been immunized from the threat of their rent outpacing their income because the apartment is rent controlled.” Five generations of a single family have used their big, beautiful, inexpensive NYC apartment to house not only themselves, but many others besides. 

Gregory Hines and Steve Martin song and dance number of the week. Watch the whole 5 minutes, and get ready to grin ear to ear.

Substack newsletter of the week. When I started reading Courtney Martin’s beautiful newsletter, the examined family, I hadn’t yet put together that she also wrote a book I really appreciate. Week after week, I have loved reading her heartful accounts of taking care of her aging father with dementia while also raising kids and navigating being a human in our broken world. A lot of people are writing newsletters like this, but Martin’s is the one that always makes me feel big feelings, in a good way.

Organization of the week. Our Children’s Trust is a nonprofit law firm supporting young people to sue for their right to a safe and healthy climate. In 2023, they won the first ever constitutional climate case to go to trial, Held v. Montana. “The world watched as 12 youth plaintiffs testified how the climate crisis harmed their health, livelihoods, ancestral and family traditions, air, land, and rivers.” If you’re looking for a keynote speaker for a youth or climate justice event, deputy director Andrea Rodgers is excellent. Donate here. 

Anti-capitalist tip of the week. Boycott Amazon. They are responsible for massive amounts of carbon emissions, they are union busters, they have fired employees who speak out, and here in Seattle, they have attempted to buy local elections and have been disastrous for housing affordability. Most of the things that I buy online, I can find somewhere other than Amazon. When it costs more, I chalk it up to paying something closer to the real price of the item.

Now, to remind us whose future that extra dollar might help protect, here’s the cute kid video of the week.² I love these kids so much. Sister solidarity!

1. What’s that you say? People with reprehensible politics should not be given a free pass? I hear you – and yet my parents, liberal Democrats, have probably done more to change the hearts and minds of people who don’t agree with them than I ever have. Both my mom and my dad have leadership roles in their relatively politically conservative church. I believe several people at their church wore masks and got vaccinated during the pandemic because of my parents. Perhaps people also rethought who they’d vote for because of my parents. My thinking about who we do and don’t have a responsibility to build relationships with has been influenced over the past few years by the very wise Garrett Bucks. Check out a representative post from his newsletter, The White Pages, here.

2. I don’t do social media, and I know this video went viral, so maybe you’ve already seen it? If you want more novelty and obscurity in your cute kid videos, send me the gems as you come across them! You can drop links into the comments of any post (I always read them) or email auntiebulletin@gmail.com. Note that The Auntie Bulletin does not publish images of children that are not already publicly available.