The Secret of Life (Bob's Viewpoint)

People are always asking me what the secret of life is from my unique perspective.  To answer that, I must take you back to my college years when I was a sophomore at Slater Hall on the University of Iowa campus.  I lived on the ninth floor in a co-ed dorm, and we called ourselves EMBOS (Debbie would not be happy if I disclosed what that stood for, but suffice to say it involved typical college male adolescent humor).  We invented a game we called "EMBOWLING", which was played in the long hallway that went the length of our dorm floor.  To play, you would set up cans in a triangular shape like regular bowling, and a person down the hallway would try to knock them down with a frisbee.  It was great fun, but we continued to develop variations to make it more difficult---just like life, the game was always changing.

Early variations included getting points not only for knocking down cans, but throwing the frisbee past the person trying to catch it.  Soon, people were just chucking the frisbee as hard as they could at the other person, and participants started wearing winter jackets, gloves, and full-face motorcycle helmets to protect themselves during play.  One day, a more diabolical variation emerged--unscrew all the light bulbs down the length of the hallway and throw a glow-in-the-dark frisbee at each other.  They found that even with no lights on it was still possible to see the frisbee coming at you, so they taped over all the windows in the hallway until it was pitch black.  You couldn't see the frisbee until it was right on top of you, and the screams of pain and injuries were frequent--we knew we were getting close to perfection, but it wasn't quite right yet.

The final refinement to EMBOWLING is what helped me develop my "Secret of Life Theory" that I tell my wife and kids, relatives, Sunday School youth, customers, and anybody else who will listen.  We discovered that the only safe place to hide in a pitch black narrow hallway when a frisbee is tracking at you is to lie prone on the floor and let it sail over your head.  This worked wonderfully until some smart ass (probably a pre-law student) went out to his car and brought back a snow tire WITH STUDS.  Someone would roll the tire down the hallway at precisely the same time that someone else would fling the frisbee, and as you ducked down to the floor, the tire would roll over your head.  Hence my theory---just when you think you've got life figured out and things are going well, somebody changes the game and rolls a studded snow tire over your head!!   Listen and learn, my friends.....til next time....Bob