Old Lady Tennis

Blond Tumbleweed sent me an email at 5:30 AM asking if I wanted to take her place at tennis yesterday morning. It seems she missed a step on her way downstairs and took a little spill. I would normally jump at the opportunity to play for her, except that I was already scheduled to play and I already didn’t want to.

I had my own injury going on. A pain and stiffness in my hip that seems to come about from writing. Well, from sitting. Dr. H has diagnosed it as Gluteal Amnesia, a term that I thought he’d just made up to amuse himself or humiliate me, but I googled it and it appears to have, if not widespread notoriety, at least familiarity among a few sports coaches and practitioners. (Laura the Tennis Pro has also been diagnosed with GA. It makes me feel a lot less old and decrepit to have the same malady as a 32-year-old athlete.)

I urged Blond Tumbleweed to come to tennis despite her injury. I told her how much pain I was in from my hip problem and reminded her that Curly Tumbleweed was coming off a respiratory infection that has left her sinus cavity so clogged up she can’t hear and it would be surprising if she could run at all without coughing up a lung.

On Fridays we play on Court 5, at the very end of the club. Court 4 usually remains empty for the whole time we play. The older women who used to play on both Courts 3 and 4 last year have winnowed themselves down to a single court (3) this season, so we are down at the end all by ourselves.

The three of us confessed our disabilities to Kelly (our fourth) and she reminded us that she has had a torn ACL or meniscus or some other knee related problem for the past year. Since we were all injured, I suggested we just play a nice game of Old Lady Tennis and call it a day.

This group that plays together on Friday is a high testosterone conglomeration of power hitters despite their all being middle-aged women. Aside from me, everyone was an athlete in high school, many in college, and a few have even joined women’s soccer and volleyball leagues as adults. Balls fly around the court at crazy speeds. I usually just pray a lot.

But we all agreed to play mellow tennis and I instantly felt better about not having to worry about running after speeding bullets or leaping tall buildings in a single bound.

Blond Tumbleweed served first and Curly Tumbleweed returned. The ball whooshed past me so fast in each direction I barely had time to register that a point was going on.

“That’s not OLT!” I said, using what I considered a clever code for Old Lady Tennis so that the old ladies playing a court away would not be offended.

“What?” said Curly T, ears entirely clogged with week old mucous.

“Never mind,” I said.

The game went on like that for an hour and a half. No one played like an old lady except, of course, for me.

“That wasn’t an Old Lady Serve!” Kelly yelled out as she received a serve from Curly Tumbleweed that nearly knocked her over.

“Shhhh!” I said, trying to protect the feelings of our Court 3 elders.

“They can’t hear us,” said Blond Tumbleweed.

“What?” said Curly again.

Curly Tumbleweed and I took the set, and maybe played the best tennis we ever had as partners.

“Do you have that?” I’d yell back to her as a ball ripped past me.

“What?” she’d say, running up and hitting it.

I play better tennis when I’m injured. It doesn’t make any logical sense, but I think I do certain things that garner a better outcome. I pay attention more, because I know I’m going to be slower to react. I don’t run after crazy balls, but try and take them in a smarter (safer) way. I make sure I’m completely stabilized before I take a shot. And maybe most critical, I keep my expectations (about winning) really low.

I watch the Court 3 ladies play and I love how confident they are. No one is reckless. Their points go on forever.

“We belong on that court,” Blond Tumbleweed said to me after the set was over. She pointed to the old ladies and I shushed her again.

“They know they’re old,” Curly Tumbleweed said.

“And they know they’re better than us,” said Kelly.

Pump the Shackle. Twice.

It seemed like an easy assignment. Pick up a combination lock at the hardware store and drop it off at the high school before the teenager goes off to lacrosse practice. But I know how things can go with all that's related to the teenager, so fortunately I gave myself a little extra time.

The guys at the hardware store are usually extremely helpful. I’d hoped to get a lock whose combination could be reset to something memorable. This is because we currently have several combination locks in our kitchen Junk Drawer and I have no recollection how to open any of them. We also have several codes that are printed on the back of the MasterLock packages. However, none of those codes seemed to match any of our locks.

The hardware store guy was nice, but couldn’t direct me to a resettable lock. They had the kind that you can make a word for the combination, and I called my son to see if that style would fit on his lacrosse locker. Just get a regular lock, he said.

I had one in my hand, standard silver with a black face. I think it cost three or four dollars. But then the inevitable happened. My eye was drawn up to the top of the peg-board display to a line of colorful, newfangled locks.

“What’s this?” I asked, removing a bright blue $11.99 specimen. It wasn’t even in a typical MasterLock hanging package – the lock was affixed to a snappy, pyramid-shaped case. It looked as though the lock itself was onstage.

“Those are new,” the guy explained. “They’re directional.”

Meaning there are no numbers. The combination is a series of arrows – up, down, left, right – and you just move the face in the proper sequence, like a joystick.

I reached up to replace the blue lock, quietly deeming it too flashy. “They’re really popular,” the guy added.

So of course, I bought it.

I drove to the high school, pulled up to the front door and began fumbling for all the various ID I was about to need in order to drop something off at the front office. As I pulled my paperwork together, the teenager strolled up to the car from his lunch hour and knocked on the window. “I got you a lock!” I said, elated that I would not have to enter the school after all.

He grabbed at it, but I realized he should just take the lock, not the whole pyramid package, so I flipped it over to see what the combination was so I could release it from its plastic home. No combination on the back of the lock. None on the back of the package either. I squinted at the infinitesimal instructions and learned that the information we needed was inside the pyramid. I literally had to saw open a trap door on the package with my fingernail to get at it.

Two small paper rolls fell out; they looked like tiny treasure maps. I opened the first and it was useless, just a bunch of stickers to decorate your lock. The second contained the information we needed, so I carefully ripped off the tiny circle of tape that held the roll intact and let it unfurl before me. It did indeed contain the combination, but when we entered it, it didn’t work.

“I have a class that starts in three minutes,” said the teenager. As if I were somehow dragging my feet.

He tried the combination. No luck. I looked back on my treasure scroll and at the very top was a tiny little sentence or two that explained how you had to clear the lock before the combination would work. That seemed simple enough. Except I didn’t know how to clear it. And the instruction that explained how had just been partially destroyed when I removed the tape. Literally, the first six words had been ripped off and I couldn’t find them anywhere.

“How do I do this? What did it say?” I said, frantically jamming my hand into the crevice next to the front seat to try and retrieve the itty bit of paper.

“Mom, I have to go,” said the teenager.

“Read it in Spanish!” I told him.

“What?”

“The instructions are written below in Spanish. Read that. What does it say?”

“I have no idea,” he said, validating anew my disappointment in our school district’s language program.

I’m not sure how I figured out that you need to pump the shackle twice, or how I even knew what the shackle was, but once we did that and entered the code, Bright Blue gave it up and the teenager dashed off with his popular, overpriced combination lock while I tried to imagine the over/under on how many days it would take before he’d lost the thing entirely and I was back at my junk drawer, racking my brains for combinations long gone.

"Is That An Anus?"

Anne Lamott is one of my favorite authors. She’s written a bunch of novels and a couple of books of essays, but she’s probably most well known for her book about writing, Bird By Bird. In it, she talks about how daunting it can be to make up characters and then have them go do things. There’s so much that goes into creating a fictional world that the whole process can become overwhelming. It’s tempting to say, “I don’t know what the hell these people are supposed to do,” and then just drop the project and go eat chocolate. So what she does to combat this, is she keeps a tiny, 2”x2” frame on her writing desk – an empty frame – and this trinket is there to remind her that all she needs to write, at any given moment, is whatever she can “see” in that 2x2” frame.

I could expound a bit on what she means by that, except this post isn’t about writing. It’s about frames. So I’ve already said all that needs to be said about Frames on Desks. Which is that, basically, they can be there simply as reminders.

In a past post, I’ve discussed The Stealing Game that I play with my neighbors. Everyone brings a wrapped white elephant gift – a gift that they themselves have received that they have no use for – and each person gets to pick a present from the pile and, essentially, take home someone else’s rejects.

There is stealing involved, but this, too, is not germane to the story.

Each year, after the holidays, my tennis group also gets together for a White Elephant Exchange. This year the gifts were all displayed in front of the fireplace, and we sat around Shelley’s living room, drinking wine and acting civilized. There isn’t the same cut-throat tension in the room when my tennis group plays this game. The real “entertainment” isn’t so much in the stealing, it’s more about what people wrap up to give away.

Shelley and Ann sat next to each other, close to the gift pile. Shelley picked up a gift bag when it was her turn and started pulling things out of it. I can’t remember all that was in it. One thing may have been a special light that screws onto your faucet and makes your water look bright blue. The last thing she pulled out was a picture frame. It was a small oval with an opening about 2 x 2.5.” It was the kind you’d put a tiny portrait in, but this frame came with a photograph already in it: a pink daisy with a black pistil (center). The photograph was cropped close and tight; mostly what you could see was the pistil, a dark organic looking center surrounded by bits of delicate pink membrane.

Ann craned her head around to look at it. “Hey, is that an anus?” she asked.

Ann is like a 40-something version of Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blond. Pink is their signature color and each of them is informed by a cheerfulness that is unfaltering, even on their darkest days.

“It’s a daisy,” someone corrected.

“Really?” said Ann. She went on to explain that she has a chocolate lab and from a certain vantage point, the photo looks a lot like the dog’s anus.

We speculated a bit, as a group, what sort of marketing strategy might lead a frame manufacturer to fill its frames with photos of anuses. (It’s not “ani” – I checked.) And soon, once Ann herself could see photograph as a daisy rather than an anus, we moved on to finish the game.

I ended up with the framed daisy/anus. I didn’t steal it; Shelley offered it to me and I accepted. I don’t usually like coming home with anything from these events, committed as I am to getting rid of things. But there was something about this photograph that I needed.

The great irony is that Ann is a woman who would normally look at a photograph of an anus and ask if it was a daisy. That’s just how she looks at the world. It’s usually me who would make the mistake that she had.

So I keep the frame on my desk, with the daisy/anus staring right at me. It reminds me that we always have a choice about how we perceive things. And that sometimes it only takes a tiny shift to move from seeing something as an anus to seeing it as a big, fresh, vibrant daisy.

In Defense of Hothouse Flowers

I am a delicate Hothouse Flower. I don’t mean to be, I just am. All us Hothouse Flowers are like that. We are born, not made.

I would typically not write about my Hothouse Flower-ness, except I had a troubling exchange with a friend the other day and realized she was under the mistaken impression that we are delicate by choice. And so I am writing on behalf of all Hothouse Flowers so that the rest of you buck-up-and-deal-with-it Tumbleweeds have a better understanding of what’s involved.

The topic came up because my friend’s husband is also a Hothouse Flower. He’d recently had general anesthesia for surgery and passed out a day and a half later at a restaurant. She was empathetic in retelling the story, but you just knew that if it had been she who’d had anesthesia, there would have been no fainting going on.

Most of my friends are Tumbleweeds. Maybe all of them. Perhaps Hothouse Flowers are not drawn to other Hothouse Flowers, for reasons only Darwin could explain.

It always surprises me how sensitive I am compared to others. For a long time, I thought everyone felt like I did. I don’t like getting pedicures because the feeling of someone handling my foot is both too ticklish and too intense. Same for massage. It takes me literally a month to recuperate from a dental cleaning. I’d actually considered not having children, ever, because I didn’t think I could hack the delivery.

My friend spoke about her husband as if he had something to do with his own sensitivity. “He’ll tell me ‘I feel something coming on,’” she said (I’ll call her Blond Tumbleweed), touching the glands in her neck to demonstrate. “Do you ‘feel things coming on?’” she asked me.

I nodded emphatically, Yes, yes, I always feel things coming on. And I begin my arsenal of preventative measures so I won’t get sick.

Blond Tumbleweed rolled her eyes and snorted at the mere idea of ‘something coming on.’ “Call me when you’re on your death bed,” she said. “I don’t need to hear about it before.”

Another friend, Curly Tumbleweed, was with us and she chimed in as well. “It has to do with how you’re raised,” she said. “When I was a kid, if I threw up in the morning my mother would say ‘Ok, can you go to school now?’”

I once played in a tennis match with Curly Tumbleweed and thought I’d broken my finger trying to catch a ball. “It’s not broken,” she said, “it’s just jammed. Come here, I’ll pop it out for you.” And with that she grabbed and pulled until I saw stars.

I’m pretty sure every woman I play tennis with is a Tumbleweed. They all show up to play with sinus infections and IBS. They wrap an ace bandage around injuries that I would be in traction for. Years ago, Blond Tumbleweed showed up on the court achy and stiff. “I can barely move my legs,” she uncharacteristically complained. Later, I found out that she’d gone to the doctor and was diagnosed with Fifth Disease (a.k.a. Parvovirus) – a relatively mild illness in children, but one that in adults presents with a rash as well as joint pain and swelling. I too had had Fifth Disease six months earlier and didn’t leave my bed for days. At one point I was in such agony my husband suggested I go to the hospital. “No, I can’t. It will be too bright there. I’d rather just die here in my bed.”

I’m not proud to be a Hothouse Flower, but neither am I ashamed. I disagree with Curly Tumbleweed – I don’t think it’s nurture at all. My brother is a Tumbleweed. He carries on with walking pneumonia and gout. Being a Hothouse Flower is just the hand you’re dealt.

I tried to explain that to Blond Tumbleweed this morning when she was scoffing about me and my “feeling something coming on.”

“You think it’s easy to be a Hothouse Flower, Blond Tumbleweed, but it’s not,” I said. She smiled to humor me, and then left me in her dust.

It's Fun To Have Fun But You Have To Know How

There are two main reasons I never go anywhere. One is social anxiety. The other is I never have the right shoes.

Both those things nearly kept me from the Girl Talk show last week, as well as a third: It was not a show at which I belonged.

There’s a good chance that you’re not familiar with Girl Talk. This is understandable. Especially if you’re on the north side of 40. For the uninitiated, Girl Talk is a deejay (aka Greg Gillis) who creates club mixes that seem to be one long fusion of hip-hop samples mashed up with almost every classic rock song riff you’ve ever heard. Prince, U2, Simon and Garfunkel with Ludacris, Jay-Z , and Usher. It’s loud and frenetic with a backbeat that makes the room shake.

This is not music I would naturally come across, except that it ended up as the staple soundtrack for my Sunday morning spin class last month. I found the mixes so infectious, I downloaded the album and have been listening to it all day, every day for weeks.

Before I even wrote this column I had a name for it: It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time. That sure does sound fatalistic, I thought. So I decided to try and reserve judgment until after I’d actually seen the show. What Happens When A Neurotic Middle Aged Woman Ends Up In A Mosh Pit was another possibility that kept popping into my head. Stop it. Just find some shoes and go.

My maiden voyage with Girl Talk existed under the most ideal circumstances imaginable. A music business friend was able to get tickets to the sold out show. He also got us VIP access. The theater is a mile from my house. We scored a free parking spot, right across the street. It was raining, so I had a built in excuse to wear my Timberlands. And the show started at 9 PM, well over an hour before my bedtime. Still, I worried.

My 16-year-old asked me if I was excited to be going. “I’m nervous,” I told him. “I don’t know what to wear.”

“Yeah. Everyone is going to be judging you,” he said, reminding me I would be effectively invisible. Which I was – not only invisible, but removed. Our VIP status allowed us access to a small gated area that stood about four feet above the dance floor. We could easily see the stage over the heads of the floor crowd and were not packed shoulder-to-shoulder with what appeared to be every 18-24 year-old in the tri-state area. It wasn’t like a “box seat” at the opera – it was just a cordoned off slab of concrete. I called it my Safe Haven.

Overlooking the dance floor we had a perfect view of those individuals being lifted overhead and redeposited within the crowd, the confetti and balloon mayhem, the sweatband boys and the girls dressed for drama.

This kind of show is probably not for everybody, and I’m pretty certain that includes me. I was never a club girl, even in my heyday. And I wear more on the beach than most of the girls were wearing that evening. But the deejay is masterful. There was a long piece about him in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago and the description of his exactitude made me think of things I’d read about Ira Glass. Standing in my Safe Haven, it occurred to me that, aside from my companion, I might be the only one in the whole theater who has ever even heard of Ira Glass.

I thought that life with a teenager and my constant exposure to the Girl Talk album would provide all the preparation I needed for a night like this one. But what prepared me most was an electronic exchange with a friend, hours before the show:

Me: I’m having second thoughts about Girl Talk.

Him: Be not afraid. It is fun, and fun is good.

Me: Sometimes I’m not so good with fun.

Him: Even if you don’t like it, I guarantee there will be plenty to write about. For example, there’s usually a guy whose only job is to reload and fire the toilet paper gun all night.

Me: Toilet paper gun?

Him: Oh, and don’t forget some earplugs. Fun can get really loud.

My sensible shoes and I ended up leaving the show a little early, in part because my senses had reached full saturation, but also because I didn’t really want to know what this crowd would be like once the music shut down.

I woke the next day at 7:00 for an early morning spin class in which I found unexpected delight in the instructor’s nine-minute ELO mash-up, as well as his butt jokes. The music was loud, but there I didn’t need earplugs. Who says I don’t know how to have fun?

The Woman in RED

I’ve stopped writing about my gecko because a while ago something happened that I wanted to write about but I wasn’t really sure how. What happened with the gecko was this:

I had been on a year-long tear trying to get rid of him. (Spot is his name.) And I chronicled that effort here, in a series of posts called The Gecko Chronicles. After trying to pawn him off on the Science teacher, I decided to take a new approach. I made a commitment to talk to anyone I saw at the pet store cricket counter and ask if they would be interested in adopting my gecko.

The first woman I tried this out on ended up being the last. She was about my age and wore one of those red Gap T-shirts with the word RED written on it. She had a shopping cart full of pet supplies and when I saw the cricket guy hand her a bag of crickets I asked her what kind of lizard she had. She, too, had a leopard gecko – two actually – and when I asked if she’d be interested in a third she said she’d be happy to take him.

That seemed so easy, right? And it was. I can’t remember how we got from that painless, positive exchange to her crying and telling me that her son was going to die and it was all her fault, but I’ll tell you this: it happened in a moment. In the blink of an eye. One minute she’d agreed to take my gecko and the next she had tears running down her face.

I didn’t know what to do or what to say, so I just nodded in an understanding way and muttered something like, “I’m so sorry,” and then we both made our way up to the register to pay for our items.

While she was checking out, she wrote out her address and phone number on a small slip of paper she took from her purse. I could call her, she said, or I could just bring the gecko to her home and leave him on her porch. She’d take good care of him, she assured me. He’d be no trouble; she had to buy crickets anyway.

I put her number in my pocket, paid for my crickets and made my way out to the parking lot after her. She was walking just ahead of me and as I got close to her I watched myself reach out and tap her shoulder. I didn’t really want to be tapping her shoulder, but I’d been recently thinking a lot about how we (and when I say we, I guess I mean I) don’t really connect with each other anymore. How all of our interactions are electronic and perfunctory and lacking in real caring for our fellow human beings. So it was that thought that impelled me to tap her, and then when she turned, for me to ask outright a question that was none of my business, which was, “Is your son ok?”

Obviously a son who is “dying” is not ok. But the mother said it was all her fault and it is just not in me to walk away from a statement like that. I would literally spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how this woman could have been killing her son. So I had to ask. And there in the parking lot, in the bright midday sun, she told me.

I am not going to tell you what she was doing to kill her son, in part because I don’t remember exactly her son’s problem, but mostly because I’m pretty sure he was not actually dying. He had some bad reaction once, years ago, to some behavioral medication she had given him and he had some residual physiological problems as a result. It became clear almost immediately that her son’s death was not imminent or even likely, but rather that she was having a very bad day.

I understand those days. I have wept in front of strangers. The big difference between me and the woman in RED is that unlike me, she does not feel the need to disappear once that weeping has taken place. So she told me more things.

She told me about all of her kids, all of their psychological issues, all of the medication they were on (names and dosage) and even the names of some of their mental health professionals. She shared with me some of her own diagnoses, her meds, her docs. She told me where her kids went to school, what schools they’d been kicked out of, what infractions had caused their dismissals. She told me a bit about her husband, including what he did for a living and how much money he’d made last year. Maybe she even told me a few other things that have faded over time.

After an hour, I excused myself. I left her with an empathetic pat on the shoulder and a wish for “good luck.” I drove home with my crickets. My back ached from standing for so long. I told my husband about her and he said, “There is no way we’re giving her the gecko.”

My husband is not definitive about much, but I could tell by the look on his face that this was not negotiable.

So I ripped up her number and fed Spot his crickets and wondered how I would explain my change of heart to her if I ever ran into her again.

"Tragic Loss"

There is never a time when it makes sense to be anything other than happy. Being unhappy never improves the situation.
- Lama Sumati Marut

That’s what I posted on my Facebook status yesterday around noon.

A little past 12:30, I received an email with the subject line: Tragic Loss. It was from the high school. A boy had died. A senior. I didn’t know him. I didn’t even recognize his name. Still, everything shifted.

I had posted my status line in response to the weather. Lots of people seemed to be depressed about the impending storm (another in a long line of storms this year) and the quote I posted always inspires me, when I get wrapped up in little things – little, uncontrollable, inevitable things – to notice that I have a choice about how I feel in the presence of those things. That those circumstances – snowstorms, traffic, stomach flus, fender benders – constitute the “small stuff.” That sometimes, most times, and if you’re a lama, maybe even all times, most of us can train ourselves to see brightness, to understand that most of the events in our lives have no inherent goodness or badness, that it is our minds that make them so. The lamas would say this is true of all events.

That’s a hard pill to swallow when a boy has died.

I panicked when I read that email. I thought my Lama Marut quote would be taken as being unfeeling, uncaring. Disrespectful. That it was like a dare to the universe to “bring it.” I went back on Facebook to remove it and I read it again. Then with tears in my eyes, I read it again. I was unhappy. And, no, it was not improving the situation.

I did a google search on the boy and turned up a Facebook Fan Page he’d created about himself that read:

On July 6th, 1993, a legend was born.

Whether you call him Mitch, Mitchell, Clifford (?), Gimpy, or Gimpsy, you can't deny this boy's sheer awesomeness.

He won our hearts in New Orleans.
He charmed us with his wit, wisdom, and sexiness.

If you're a fan of this 4'10" bundle of amazingness, (and who wouldn't be?), you are morally obligated to join this group.

Right then and there I fell a little bit in love.

In the past, I would have spent the entire day looking up information about this young man – who was he? how did he die? – and propel myself into a deep, inexorable funk. Yesterday, I wafted in and out of obsessing and funkdom, but I didn’t dwell there. In between, I made my family its favorite dinner. I took time from my work to watch The Office with my son. I charged my Kindle for the impending ice storm. I left the Lama Marut quote up.

I didn’t know this boy. And my sadness is not improving anything. But I remain unenlightened: It’s making me feel better to cry.