I’m not going to tell you lawn bowling is cool. I’m not going to sell you on its virtues or convince you it’s some misunderstood sport deserving of your respect. That’s not the point. The point is that I’ve spent the better part of my adult life trying to escape Palo Alto, and here I am, standing on the immaculate green at the Palo Alto Lawn Bowling Club, watching old men and women in white outfits execute shots with the precision of surgeons and the quiet desperation of people who know something the rest of us haven’t figured out yet.
I grew up here. In the Stanford Faculty Ghetto. Yeah. Let that sink in for a second. The ghetto. That’s what they actually call it. The Professor’s Ghetto. The Faculty Ghetto. As if living in one of the most expensive, privileged neighborhoods in one of the most expensive, privileged zip codes in America is somehow equivalent to systematic disinvestment and structural inequality. As if having tenure and a Craftsman bungalow worth five million dollars is the same thing as being economically trapped. How fucked up is that? How completely, perfectly, quintessentially Palo Alto is it that even our privilege comes wrapped in a layer of ironic self-deprecation that somehow makes it worse?
That’s the thing about growing up here. You develop this acute awareness of absurdity, this constant low-grade nausea at the disconnect between language and reality, between what people say and what they mean, between the progressive yard signs and the structural violence of a place where teachers and firefighters can’t afford to live within fifty miles of where they work.
The lawn bowlers don’t seem bothered by any of this.
That’s what gets me. These guys, and yeah, they’re mostly guys, mostly old, mostly white, which is its own conversation about who gets to age gracefully in a town that worships youth and disruption, they’ve somehow opted out of the entire performance. While everyone else in the Ghetto is frantically proving their intellectual worth at faculty dinners or their kids are being groomed for the same institutions that groomed their parents, these men are rolling balls across grass.
There’s something almost obscene about it. The quiet. The patience. The complete absence of hustle in a place where even leisure is optimized. You stand there watching them, and it’s like someone hit pause on the simulation. Time moves differently at the lawn bowling club. Slower. More deliberate. Like maybe time is something you can choose to experience on your own terms, which is a revolutionary concept when you grow up in a place where five-year-olds have tutors and middle schoolers are strategizing their college applications.
I’ve tried to leave the Ghetto, and again, how grotesque is it that I even have to call it that?, seventeen different ways. Geographically, philosophically, psychologically. I’ve put thousands of miles between myself and those tree-lined streets with the million-dollar homes and the educated liberals who somehow can’t see the irony in calling their neighborhood a ghetto while supporting policies that ensure it stays exclusive. I’ve remade myself in opposition to everything this place represents.
And yet…
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about the places that make you: they’re not just where you’re from. They’re the lens through which you see everything else. They’re the voice in your head that’s been trained since childhood to spot hypocrisy, to question language, to understand that words mean something and when we use them carelessly or ironically, we’re doing real damage. The Ghetto taught me that. The Ghetto, with its oblivious appropriation of a term that carries real pain and real history, taught me to pay attention to what people call things and why.
The lawn bowlers aren’t calling anything anything. They’re just rolling balls and drinking coffee and talking shit and occasionally executing a shot so perfect it makes you believe in something you can’t quite name.
My therapist, and I should say our therapist cause all my friends are going to the same therapist right now, once asked me what I was really running from. I gave him the standard answers. The hypocrisy. The liberal guilt that somehow never translates into actual change. The way I was raised to be conscious of privilege but never to actually relinquish any of it. The dinner parties where Stanford professors debate inequality while the person cleaning their house can’t afford health insurance.
But watching these old guys on the green, I realize there’s something else. I’m running from the terror of admitting that maybe I’m complicit. That maybe you can’t grow up in a place called the Ghetto, even ironically, especially ironically, without absorbing some of its fundamental dishonesty. That maybe all my escape attempts are just another form of the same performance, the same liberal guilt theater where we acknowledge problems but never actually threaten our own comfort.
These men have cracked some kind of code. They’ve found a way to exist in Palo Alto without being consumed by its contradictions. They’ve created this little pocket universe where the rules are different, where the only thing that matters is the weight of the ball in your hand and the line you want it to travel and the satisfying click when it connects with exactly what you were aiming for.
It’s modest. It’s analog. It’s completely pointless in any conventional sense. Which is precisely why it matters.
I used to think freedom meant getting as far from the Ghetto as possible. Now I’m starting to suspect it might mean something else entirely. It might mean finding your lawn bowling club, whatever that is for you, and showing up to it regularly even when every fiber of your being is screaming about the absurdity of it all, the privilege of it all, the way you’re allowed to just be while other people are struggling to survive in the service economy that makes your leisure possible.
Maybe that’s the thing. Maybe the lawn bowlers have figured out that you can’t atone your way out of where you’re from. You can’t perform enough guilt or travel far enough or be self-aware enough to erase the fundamental fact of having been raised in comfort. Maybe the only honest thing to do is acknowledge it and then decide what you’re going to do anyway. Roll the ball. Drink the coffee. Exist in the contradiction without pretending it isn’t there.
The truth is, I’ll never really leave the Faculty Ghetto. Not because I live there, I haven’t in decades, but because it’s in my wiring. It’s in my acute awareness of language and its failures. It’s in my inability to enjoy anything without simultaneously deconstructing the systems that make it possible. It’s in every complicated relationship I have with comfort and privilege and the simple pleasure of doing something for no reason other than that it feels good to do it.
The lawn bowlers of Palo Alto aren’t selling anything. They’re not building anything. They’re not disrupting anything. They’re not calling their neighborhood a ghetto while living in multi-million dollar homes. They’re just here, doing this thing that’s been done essentially the same way for centuries, and somehow that feels like the most radical act possible in a place that’s built its entire identity on a foundation of contradiction it refuses to examine.
After tea it’s back to painting – a large poplar at dusk with a gathering storm. From time to time instead of this evening painting session I go bowling in one of the neighbouring villages, but not very often.
Gustav Klimt