The first (and almost last) time I held a tennis racquet was when I was a gawky 13-year-old with pink ponytail-bands and pink-rimmed eyeglasses (hehe, those were the days…) when one of my first-year highschool classmates *tried* to teach me the rudiments of the game.

Suffice to say, I did a bad job at that ‘first lesson’, being very thin(!) and very uncoordinated at that time. Plus, I had to keep my pink-rimmed eyeglasses from slipping down my nose the whole time. (Why I didn’t just take those glasses off the same way I did when I played volleyball, I really can’t remember. Maybe it was because the tennis ball was so much smaller. Heh.). I’ve always thought that that session was a total failure on my part.

So, in a conscious effort to put that ‘failure’ as far behind me as I could, I never tried taking up tennis again. That is, not until last week (some 17 years and maybe 40 pounds later) when one of my friends handed me her tennis racquet and got off her side of the court, leaving me with the racquet in my right hand, while with my left I was still holding the volleyball that I had brought to the park.

Telling myself that if my friend, who is about the same height and weight as I am (although I think she’ll be quick to challenge this assertion), could play the game then I could too, and because my ‘opponent’ was already sending a whizzing bright green ball my way, I let go of the volleyball and did my best to hit the tennis ball with the racquet hard enough so that it got over the net and to the other side of the court.

To make a short story shorter, I found the game surprisingly fun. In fact, I enjoyed every minute of it, even when, the second day I played, some of our friends good-naturedly (I hope!) heckled me from the sidelines, and laughed when I held the racquet like one would hold a baseball bat.

After playing for two days, I was hooked. I’ve bought my own racquet (for heights 4′ 6″ - 5′, haha) and a tumbler of tennis balls. I’ve been bugging my friends about playing this afternoon (there is sunlight in these parts until about 8:30pm), but it seems that everyone who plays is either at work, or resting so that they could stay up late to watch the NBA game tonight.

Oh well, the NBA it is tonight then. And tomorrow…tomorrow it better be tennis.
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Quick question: What’s YOUR game these days?

Posted under Navel-Gazing