So Much to Do, So Little Time

Leon Malkin bowls a spare, his third of the day. Nothing spectacular, but for a guy celebrating his 98th birthday ("A big piece of cake, please"), not shabby. And, as he sees it, considerably better than the alternative.

"We moved to Leisure World waiting to die," Malkin says during a break in the action at the White Oak duckpin bowling lanes in Silver Spring. Then, he didn't.

So he bowls Mondays at noon. Three games, four lanes, a whole lot of laughs. It's a pursuit Malkin had never even considered earlier in life.

"I had to raise a family," he says. "The heaviest sport I had was playing chess. But don't worry. You don't have to exercise to live a long life. You just have to have good genes."

The senior player in the Leisure World Mixed Duckpin Bowling League was an economist, a professor, an entrepreneur (deli, launderette). During the Depression, his was one of the pioneer families in the suburban utopia of Greenbelt, which he had to move out of when he got a federal promotion, bumping his salary over the limit for a community designed for the working man. Later, Malkin helped in the launch of the federal Head Start early childhood education program and worked as an accountant for the Montgomery County government.

He reads voraciously, even now. Sometimes, he writes poetry. He takes care of his wife, who is ailing. And he bowls, with an 84 average (the league keeps very detailed stats).

"When winter comes and harsh winds blow, we mortals are like leaves on a tree that wither and fall away," he recalls from a poem he wrote not long ago.

Then, Malkin tells me: "I think of myself as a leaf."

But those who let themselves be carried by the winds are not generally the people who have the discipline and purpose to reread Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," which Malkin says he "took up again because I think that's what's happening to us right now."

Best president in his life: Dwight Eisenhower, "because he recognized how little he knew and he got good people and didn't interfere with them."

Worst: The guy in charge right now. "A cowboy. Just the sight of him upsets me."

Despite having been buffeted by the winds of politics -- he says he lost his job as an economist for the federal maritime board after Sen. Joseph McCarthy's hunt for communists in the federal government turned toward him -- Malkin long ago decided that the affairs of state are not what matters.