Who knew
when I was six (1963)—
watching my Lutheran uncles,
members of Hope Lutheran's team
throwing deadly, steel-tipped darts
at a 4x4-foot, dart ball board,
like baseball—
that
in 2025
you'd still love me, cherish me
enough to smile and high-five me
still a kid here, at 71, in our
Luther Manor senior-living home
apartment—after throwing my
third homerun dart in a row?
And, God! Who knew,
you—my love of 47 years—would
get a crowd-cheering, rip-roaring
double off an errant dart, one
skimming the ceiling tiles, before
reentering the recreation room's
atmosphere, only to stick
right into second base?
You were so embarrassed!
And then, Liz, 98, was up.
Blind almost as a proverbial bat,
she notoriously threw a dozen or more
darts (most falling to the floor), before
hitting a homer herself …to score!
And, all was great until Liz went
to retrieve herself her fallen darts. It
took four of our more-abled to lift
her up from her knees! (Any worse,
we'd have had to call an EMT!)
Meanwhile, the usual fuss and
commotion. Twenty-some seniors
shouting over each other, because
most couldn’t hear: What's the score?
What inning is it? When's the
year-end party? And on and on....
Liz sign up first to make and
bring her American Potato Salad,
leaving Mary with the German.
(It's a Wisconsin thing... a holdover
from Lutheran church suppers! And,
woe to anyone looking to change it!)
Being new, we just kicked in money.
Dart ball is every Tuesday. 7 p.m.
Couldn't help but also recall,
that Thanksgiving playing dart ball
with all my cousins in 1963, in
Uncle Rollie & Aunt Joyce's
basement. Their new ranch with
its so-cool laundry chute, a hole to
drop down toys and all sorts of stuff!
My dart just missed my running
littler cousin's head, by a breath...
How different our lives
might have been, I reflected,
had that deadly, steel-tipped dart
connected. Funny the things our
brains choose to repress, to not
remember until one day something,
like Luther Manor's dart ball board,
brings it flooding back fresh…
Who knew life would continue,
that we'd eventually meet, love, marry,
have kids and a life so sweet ...just
to play dart ball together.
Just lucky, I guess.
Thomas A. Thrun's poems are influenced by the poetry of Robert Frost and his Wisconsin farming heritage, as well as by other present-day poets. His poetry also can be found in the 2022 and 2024 Wisconsin Poets' Calendar (Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets), Moss Piglet anthology, (Krazines.com, WI, Dec. 2022) and Hunger: An Anthology (Transcendent Zero Press, Houston, TX, 2022), among other anthologies. Thrun, retired with his wife in Wauwatosa, WI, is a former editor of award-winning weekly newspapers in Wisconsin and Washington State. He enjoys spoiling his 9 and 10-year-old grandsons and working with wood, kindness and empathy.