Walk the Walk

A little bit ago, I was asked to write an entry for Laurie Lico Albanese's excellent blog: My Big Walk. (One woman. One year. One thousand miles.) When she first told me about this project I was nearly insane with jealousy. I could do that: one thousand miles in a year. That's only three miles a day. Chicken feed.

Well, my commitment to walking has waned as the weather's gotten colder. I used to be intrepid. Now I'm a wimp. The truth is, as soon as I wrote this piece about how I walk every single Sunday, I started blowing off the Sunday walk and opting for a nice, warm spin class instead.

Here's me backpedaling: Nancy and I do make it a point to walk together once a week, but sometimes it's not on Sunday. And sometimes it's later in the morning. This is just one of the reasons that the Walking Blog is such a great project for Laurie -- not for me. I'm sticking with tennis and geckos.

You can read the post here.

Do The Right Thingy

I’m not kidding: I think my game changed when I replaced my vibration dampener.

I don’t usually call it a dampener. I call it my racquet string thingy, which, as the name implies, is a little rubber doohickey that you can attach to your racquet strings. I used to think its job was to help you identify your racquet if it was sitting among many of the same brand, but in fact its job is to reduce the vibrations of the strings when you whack the ball, in theory making things a bit easier on your arm.

Dampeners are all pretty much the same size and shape, but you can get them in many different designs. My first one was a green four-leaf clover. I found that dampener years ago at the bottom of my son’s tennis bag and stuck it on my racquet on a lark. From that point on I never gave it a second thought.

This past fall when I bought my new racquet, I realized that the green clover was going to clash with the orange frame, so I acquired a new thingy– I’m not completely sure how – and the clover went into retirement. This new thingy was a bright yellow smiley face. Maybe it, too, had been my son’s, or maybe Laura the Tennis Pro gave it to me. It was fine. It did its job – it dampened. And it fit with the racquet color well enough.

But it didn’t feel right. I would look down at my racquet strings, notice the smiley and flip the racquet over expecting a “frowny” on the other side. It seemed like it should be witty like that – one side for “good shots” and one side for crappy ones. But the face was smiley on both sides and I became disappointed anew every time I flipped it, always hoping for a different outcome.

“I hate my little rubber thingy,” Gina said to me one day. (We all call them thingies.)

“I love yours!” I said. Gina had the sign of the Tao – classic black and white.

“I’m not a Ying/Yang kind of person,” she said. I’d thought everyone was.

“I’m not a Smiley,” I said about my own thingy.

“That’s for sure,” she said. “Wanna trade?”

And within 30 seconds, we each had a more appropriate – maybe even more righteous – thingy on our racquets.

My sign of the Tao totally rocks my TeamZen racquet. I started playing better instantly. Instantly. You truly cannot underestimate the power of the right thingy.

The Gecko Chronicles - V

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

WHY WE NEED GIRLFRIENDS
Here’s what it takes to keep the gecko alive:

- One trip to the store for live crickets every 5-7 days
- Turning the “day” lamp on in the morning and off at night

That doesn’t sound so hard, does it?

But somehow, about a year ago, it began to feel very hard and very onerous and it started breeding a certain resentment that didn’t make complete sense, but felt awful just the same. I spent a period of time feeling hateful, and then feeling like a bad mother/pet-owner/person. Finally, I decided it was time to actually do something about my situation. So I called Shelley.

Shelley has an enormously kind heart toward animals. She’s in her mid-forties, but is well on her way to becoming one of those daffy old women with a houseful of cats. She already has three of her own and then three more that are neighborhood strays but consider Shelley their de facto benefactor. But more importantly, Shelley was once the primary caretaker of skinks.

A skink is like a cross between a gecko and an albino eel. They spend most of their lives living under the sand in their tanks, which is just as well because they’re horrible looking. Shelley came by her skinks graciously – they were a gift to her husband from someone on his staff. Like geckos, skinks need heat lamps and night-lights, and also like geckos, they eat live crickets.

As soon as I started to share my Gecko Remorse, Shelley jumped right in. “You have to get rid of him,” she said. “You’re done. You’ve served your time. The happiest day I can remember was the day I unloaded those hideous skinks.”

From that point on my spirits lifted. Shelley didn’t think I was either selfish or inhumane for being tired of fetching crickets. So together, like Lucy and Ethel, we began to cobble together an exit strategy.

The Gecko Chronicles - IV

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

SPOT: THE EARLY YEARS
When Spot was little, my husband and the boys would take him out and play with him. I would pace the hallway waiting for the gecko to be replaced in his cage so I could supervise the scrubbing of family hands. It was almost as if I could perceive the little malevolent salmonella droplets forming on my children’s extremities. Maybe reptiles and germaphobes shouldn’t cohabitate.

While I complain a lot about bearing the burden of the gecko, it’s really my husband who’s been his main caretaker. He’s so nurturing to pets it’s crazy. He grew up with dogs, cats, snakes, tarantulas, horses and a goat. He’s got this way with animals that I can’t really relate to. Once, when we first started dating, a friend gave him a lost stray kitten, not even old enough to be away from its mother. Scott lived in a long, railroad style apartment and I walked in one day to find him crawling the length of the apartment backwards. The kitten was in front of him – they were face to face – and Scott was leading the cat slowly through the apartment, like a mother would, so the cat would know his way around and not get lost.

Meanwhile, back at my own apartment lived a caged parakeet that my roommate had bought for me. I used to try and get the bird to come out and play but he was either misanthropic or agoraphobic; he would pull his cage door closed with his beak whenever I left it opened.

So it was always Scott that changed Spot’s sand, filled his water, sprayed his flora, scooped his poop. Once a month, Scott empties the whole tank, bleaches it and refills it with fresh gecko accoutrements. One day one of the glass walls broke while he was scrubbing it. There was blood everywhere and Scott needed to go to the ER for stitches. I was in the middle of hemming pants for my son as he had a bar mitzvah to attend in thirty minutes. So I cursed the gecko for inconveniencing me with an ER run in the middle of an already hectic Saturday morning. He just always seemed like trouble to me.

But that doesn’t mean I didn’t grow unexpectedly fond of Spot in my own quiet way. The truth is, I feel like there’s a lot to love about lizards. They invariably have cute feet. And they always move in a slow, sultry way. Like Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Or Scarlett Johansson in just about anything.

Plus I get an inexplicable rush watching him chow down on live crickets. It’s not even an anti-cricket thing for me. There’s just something so direct and unapologetic about it. He’s like, “Yo, I’m going to eat you!” And then he does.

TMI (Too Much Information)

Spoiler Alert: This post is about menstruation. So if that troubles you in some way, you may want to just skip over it and wait for another installment of The Gecko Chronicles.

When I have my period, I play great tennis.

There, I’ve said it. I wish I could describe what it is that happens, but it’s not any one thing. I can run faster. My reflexes are quicker. I’m more coordinated. I can get shots that I can’t make at any other time – backhand ground shots that I need to run across the court for, volleys coming straight at my face. I yell to my partner, “I got it!” and then I really do get it.

It’s amazing.

I mean it’s really amazing, because there’s no good explanation for it. I spent some time online today, trying to see whether there was some hormonal reasoning for it. Evidently not. Studies show that heightened estrogen levels can result in increased motor function and coordination – even brain function – but estrogen levels drop to their lowest when your period comes on, so that doesn’t track.

I’ve long suspected it’s the Advil that actually sharpens me, but I’ve arrived on the court with various other aches and pains, popped some Advil and have never seen quite the same result. Maybe it’s the combination of achy back, ibuprofen and feeling like I want to kill someone that creates the magic. Because magic it is. Everyone notices. It’s like I turn into spry, competent 30-year-old, albeit a cranky one.

The sad thing is, now that I’m older than the hills, my period only lasts for two days. It’s unusual for me to play tennis two days in a row, so really we’re talking about one good tennis day a month, tops. The rest of the month, I suck.

I’m not sure what will happen when I go through the change and stop menstruating altogether. I imagine it won’t bode well for my backhand.

The Gecko Chronicles - III

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

A LITTLE BACKSTORY
One of my friends is a real stickler about the use of the word “ironic.” It drives her a little nuts when people say something is “ironic” when it’s really just a wacky coincidence or an incongruous turn of events. I’m so gun-shy about using the term incorrectly, I barely ever use it at all.

I think it’s safe to say that there’s no actual irony in the fact that I own a gecko. It may be unexpected in some ways, but largely it’s a big ho hum.

What is truly remarkable though is that to feed the gecko, it is I who must procure live crickets.

Of course, I don’t go out into the wild and hunt them. As I’ve said, I buy them at Petco (at a discount, no less). But anyone who knows me from way back when (and that would be from childhood up until three years ago) knows that I simply cannot be in the same room, apartment, house, porch, car or swimming pool as bugs. Especially not ugly, noisy, unpredictable bugs, which, as far as I’m concerned, encompasses all bugs except for maybe those little roly polys bugs, and that’s only when they’re all rolled up. My entire youth was spent running hither and yon, screaming at lungtop over bees, wasps, spiders, cockroaches, waterbugs, caterpillars and, yes, crickets.

I am not trying to toot my own horn when I say that the level of good sportsmanship I’ve exhibited over these past few years is nothing short of astounding. In addition to training myself to carry a clear plastic bag of restless, agitated crickets from pet store to car, to single-mindedly driving while they rollick around on the seat beside me, and to untying that bag and shaking the contents out into the gecko tank, I’ve also trained myself to cope with the inevitable escapee that ends up on the second-floor landing or beside my toilet.

My eldest son is old enough now that he can do the job that he’s been put on this earth to do: kill errant crickets to save his mother’s sanity. So most of the time, I’m at peace.

Nevertheless, I would not call it a “wacky coincidence” that I sleep no more than 20 feet away from a big glass box filled with a dozen or more jumpy, feckless insects – insects that I have paid good money for and deposited there myself.

Is it ironic? I don’t know. But one day about a year ago I realized that what it is, is fucking nuts.

How Sweet It Is

I’m not sure there’s a whole lot to say about this, but it needs to be commemorated. Yesterday at the end of tennis clinic…I didn’t look at the time, but I should have…Laura the Tennis Pro finally said the words we all (well, at least I) have been waiting years to hear. She said, “You guys are really good.”

Wait. Maybe she said, “You guys are really getting good.”

Or, “Wow, you guys are good.”

It’s my lot in life that moments like this, moments that I crave for such a long time, come and go so quickly – and send me into such a giddy shock – that I can’t even remember them millisecond by millisecond so I can replay them in my mind and savor them.

It’s not that Laura is stingy with praise; she’s not. She always tells us when we’ve hit a good ball, or that we’re improving at a particular shot. But this was different. This was the affirmation that we’ve tried to draw out of her, sometimes coyly, sometimes outright, for what seems like ever.

I remember years ago, getting up my nerve and asking her something like, “So, we’re getting better, right?”

We miss a lot of shots and sometimes we don’t know where on the court we’re supposed to be. It’s taken a long time for each of us to stop being afraid – of playing the net, of running backwards, of hitting hard, of wanting to win. And when I’d asked Laura that question, fishing for some much-anticipated narrative about our improvement, she answered positively. But not in the way I wanted.

Her answer was Yes. But it was accompanied by this little motion she does with her head – sort of a side-to-side nod – which means, “yes, you’re improving, but you still have a long way to go.”

Yesterday’s feedback was different. No one had asked. No one was even paying attention to her. The four of us were just playing a game, doing our jobs, and Laura’s head was perfectly still when she said it – whatever it was she said.

She was smiling and proud and in spite of my not remembering her precise words, I knew exactly what she meant.

OMG! You guys seem like you sort of know how to play tennis now!

For this klutzy, non-athletic, tennis latecomer that was 100% sweetness. Totally worth the wait.