Black Sheep in White Tennies

When I got to the tennis “club” on Friday morning, it was already a few minutes past nine. No one was on Court 5 and no one was in the lounge. Laura had sent me a message earlier saying she may be a few minutes late, so I figured I’d just sit and wait for her. Suddenly I saw Ann’s head pop out of the Pro Shop and then dart back in. I wandered back there and found her and Eileen sitting on the floor trying on tennis shoes. Laura the Tennis Pro was there too, pulling boxes of shoes from the closet.

“Um, it’s after nine,” I said, assuming they were just shopping to kill time.

“Ann forgot her sneakers,” said Eileen.

“And Laura won’t let me play in my Uggs,” said Ann.

Two minutes later, Ann was sauntering out of the Pro Shop with her brand new black tennis shoes.

I’ve mentioned before how we have this unspoken rule that everyone is to wear black on Fridays. I’ve mentioned before that this is because we fancy ourselves a group of badasses. Have I mentioned that now, with Ann’s new purchase, everyone has black sneakers except me?

My sneakers are white leather with pale blue accents. They look like nurses shoes and there’s not a thing badass about them. I just bought them a month ago at a local sneaker store that I like to patronize so it doesn’t go out of business like all the other stores downtown. They had one pair of tennis shoes in my size – white ones – and I bought them.

I tried mightily to do what I usually do when I’m feeling left out – I tried to minimize the importance of the experience in my mind. But the evidence was incontrovertible. Ann became about 75 degrees cooler as soon as she put those shoes on. She ran faster and jumped higher. I think she even hit a better backhand.

Ok, did I just really say that? “…do what I usually do when I’m feeling left out…?” Have I just tossed my “badass” credentials right out the minivan window?

How is Laura going to divide us into teams if only one of us is ever wearing white tennis shoes? Of course this is simply about wanting to have the same sneakers as everyone else.

Of course it is.

Tennis Nazi

I received this note from Shelley this morning.

To Whom It May Concern:

Please excuse Shelley for being late. She had an ice cube freezer malfunction which she had to deal with before leaving. She also had to take her son to school since her parents were in their bathrobes. She will try to do better next time.

Her Mother

The note was a thoughtful gesture, written on proper stationary that folds into it's own envelope. More thoughtful, though, was the salutation. If she'd really been honest, it would have been addressed directly to me: "Dear Tennis Nazi:"... and would have gone on to say: "Please don't make my daughter feel like a pariah for showing up five minutes late for your tennis clinic. Get a life."

It's hard to understand why I'm so militant about tennis. Everyone I play with adores the clinics and games, but I'm the only one standing around tapping my toes about lateness. I'm not like that about anything else in my life, ever.

"Tennis Ladies" have a bit of a reputation for bitchiness. I wonder if this is how it starts.

The Gecko Chronicles - II

Note: The Gecko Chronicles are not posted sequentially, but you can find them all batched in a tidy little group at the left.

MEET SPOT
Spot is our Spotted Leopard Gecko. He’s about ten inches long and spotted in the same manner as a giraffe. He’s not very emotionally demonstrative and spends most of his time inside his “cave.” This is what leads me to believe that he’s a boy. He also has the tendency to stop eating once he’s satisfied, regardless of how many crickets are still sashaying about. Another early indicator of maleness.

I’m not sure how old he is but it seems we’ve had him forever. He started out as a pet for my older son who is allergic to all things furry. Initially, Spot would eat both live crickets and bloodworms (which is, I think, a euphemism for “maggots”). The bloodworms could be kept in the refrigerator and had a longer “shelf life” than the crickets because they themselves did not need to eat or drink to stay alive. (I don’t even know if there were alive. They sure were ugly, though.)

Somewhere along the line, Spot lost his taste for bloodworms and become a strict Cricketarian. The crickets are purchased live, dumped into his glass tank, and then Darwinian theory takes over. Sometimes it takes Spot four or five days to eat all the crickets. In the meantime, they chirp.

It is this chirping that ultimately caused us to move Spot’s tank from my son’s room into a more public area. The crickets are loud and they’d wake him in the middle of the night (my son, not Spot). Once the gecko moved out of my son’s room, guess who’s responsibility he became?

Right.

The Gecko Chronicles

Here’s what just happened: I walked into Petco, bundled up in my long black down coat and crazy woolen knit hat and the guy at the counter – the one with the pierced eyebrow – looked up from the register at me and said, “Crickets?”

He got on the intercom and, without my even having to specify my order, asked that someone please bring up a bag of “fifteen large crickets, please.” Within two minutes another Petco employee was handing me my crickets and ushering me over to an open register. His hand hovered over the keyboard because he knows that I do have a Petco card (which entitles me to cents off on each cricket) but that I never have it with me (because I lost it a year ago) and he’s waiting for me to recite my phone number so he can punch it in and call up my account. He knows this, just as readily as Pierced Eyebrow knows that my gecko is too finicky to eat the pre-bagged crickets that are displayed in the aisle across from the register. That my gecko needs crickets that have been free to roam among their brethren for as long as possible, crickets that haven’t given up the good fight yet, so that my gecko can chase them around a bit and feel like he’s actually hunting his prey – even though he’s probably the world’s laziest reptile.

“I just have to go on record,” I said to my Petco clerk, “that while I’m impressed by your customer service efforts, it’s a little disheartening that as soon as I walk through the door everyone knows I’m here for crickets.”

He smiles.

“I mean, it’s really nice and all, but I never thought my life would come to this: being known as The Cricket Lady.”

“Oh, you’re not the only one,” he said. “You’re not The Cricket Lady. You’re just A Cricket Lady.”

Which he said (I’m absolutely certain) to make me feel better. But for some reason, had the exact opposite effect.

Note: The Gecko Chronicles are not posted sequentially, but you can find them all batched in a tidy little group at the left.

How I Suffer for Love

It’s Sunday night and the wind is howling. Google Weather says it’s 19 degrees but the thermometer outside my kitchen door says four. I’ve barely left the house today, committed as I am to maintaining physical warmth, so the cold shouldn’t be so much of an issue, but it is. Because tomorrow is a tennis day.

I usually play Mondays and Fridays with an occasional Tuesday or Thursday thrown in. The last time I played tennis was 12 days ago and I am literally counting the hours until my clinic tomorrow. (Seventeen, as of this writing.) My whole family is counting the hours, because I have become such a shrew the past few days. No one can stand it when I don’t play tennis, least of all me.

But the “club” where I play is cold. It’s cold in general, and then on these windy, frigid days it’s unbearable. Laura the Tennis Pro sometimes wears a fleece cap the whole time because she just never warms ups. We’re all layered and some are scarved. I would be gloved if it were possible to play that way. We jump around in place waiting for any little dash or sprint that will allow us to generate some body heat. We pray for spring.

I refer to the club as the “club” because the term club connotes a certain elegance or sophistication that this “club” sorely lacks. Obviously, my biggest beef is the temperature. But often the whole experience is like playing tennis in an old church basement. The décor is tacky – tragic because someone recently made the decision to redo the lounge and managed to take the original downscale elements and trade them for downer scaled versions. White faux bamboo seating was replaced with white plastic patio chairs. The kind you can get at the hardware store for $10.

I’ve often gotten locked in the bathroom, both in the stall and in the bathroom proper, where latches don’t work, or doors fall off hinges. It’s a little risky to pee there.

On Fridays we’re on Court 5 and there’s some big, metal apparatus hanging over one side of the court that seems like it’s blasting cold air half the time. I think that’s the “heater.” On the other side of the court is an exhaust fan that intermittently goes on and shuts off and when it’s on you can’t hear a word anyone is saying. Even the number on Court 5 is shabby. The other courts have a big numeral stenciled on the back wall. Court Five’s numeral is hand-rendered and half the size of the others. Shelley, who is most comfortable in a tidy and orderly environment, finds this numbering faux pas an abomination.

I’m not sure what the answer is. North Face tennis skirts? Hot toddies on the sideline? It’s all so easy to complain about here and now, in that counterproductive way I have of somehow trying to ruin something that I am so ardently looking forward to. Of trying to temper the gloriousness of something that I’ve come to so desperately need.

The Truth About Sex and Food

“The way to want sex more, is to have more sex,” one player said to another during a water break in clinic.

Sex comes up a lot in Friday tennis, but the truth is, we talk about it in a very general way. We’re more detailed in our descriptions of vacuuming or cat feces than we ever are about what goes on behind closed doors.

“I know,” said Player 2, “but I’m always so cold.”

“Sex will make you warmer,” offered Player 3. (We’re very supportive.)

“But I’m just really cold. I’m freezing all the time.”

“If you were doing Weight Watchers, you could use sex as Activity Points,” I said. Activity Points translate into extra Food Points based on a simple slide-rule formula. I know this is a shabby reason to have sex, but true motivation for so many things so often comes from unexpected places. “If you have more sex, you could eat more.”

Someone’s head was shaking. “I don’t know about that,” said Player 3. “It depends who with.”

This got everyone’s attention. Did she have someone specific in mind? Are there particular people named in the Weight Watchers manual that qualify for Activity Points while others do not? Somehow I must have missed that page.

“You need to have sex with a stranger,” she declared. “Sex with your spouse – or a longtime partner – is the same as walking up a flight of stairs. Sex with a stranger is like sprinting up the wall of your garage.”

We all nodded. Not that any of us would know firsthand.

Old Dog/New Tricks

In an effort to help me improve my serve, Laura the Tennis Pro recently offered some suggestions and advice. First, she said, “I have an analogy for you…” and proceeded to spin a tale about an archer and his bow and arrow. She drew the necessary parallels between the two activities – serving a tennis ball and shooting an arrow – and then stood behind me, satisfied that this analogy would transform my wimpy serve into one of power and authority.

Laura knows I love analogies. So, I didn’t tell her at the time that, although she presented the information as an “analogy,” it was still, fundamentally, “physics.” And, as I’ve mentioned, physics is Greek to me.

When my serve didn’t improve immediately upon receipt of the analogy, Laura decided to take a more active role. “You’re bringing your back foot up too early,” she said. “It can’t leave the ground until you’ve hit the ball.”

This was solid, concrete information that I could work with, so I served again – and again and again – trying mightily to keep my foot on the ground longer. It was harder than I expected. Finally, Laura brought over a Teaching Aid. She has these little plastic cones – like miniature traffic cones – and she lay one down at my back foot and instructed me to put my foot inside it. “That will keep you from moving your foot,” she said. And she was right.

The mini cone anchored my foot, it was true, but it also anchored my mind (and not in a good way). All I could think of was the image of a dog recovering from surgery, his head wrapped in on of those white plastic cones. I remember Paula Poundstone doing a joke about them once: “Why do they put cones over the animals’ heads? Is humiliation part of the healing process?”

It is no doubt part of the learning process. Maybe not humiliation per se, but that state of being aware of what you’re doing wrong, what you should be doing instead, and the sheer helplessness of feeling that you can’t make yourself behave in new ways. I am reminded that so much of the way we live is just comfortable habit. We get in the habit of being late, or worried or unhappy and it feels so impossible to change. But we can actually change so much about our lives by just breaking old habits and forging new ones. Which makes it all seem so easy, right?

Except when you realize that sometimes the simplest little changes require suffering the indignation of a cone – that big plastic reminder that things need to be uncomfortable for a little bit while you find your new way.