…start playing tennis again.  It’s only been, what, twenty years or so?  I remember the last time I really played.  I was pregnant with my third son, and one day as I was battling through a set with my old friend Vicki, I had too much trouble running to the net with my big pregnant self, and that was that.  I put my racket down and haven’t picked it up since, to speak of.  Since that time I’ve played a good amount of pickleball, a common game in the Northwest.  It’s sort of like tennis-meets-ping-pong on a mini-court.  You play with large wooden paddles and whiffle balls.  It was a game easily played inside, and due to the often wet weather in Seattle, it became quite popular.  But here in northern California, the weather is great for tennis and there are courts everywhere, so, why not?

Back to my story.  So I see this flyer advertising a ‘drop-in’ tennis lesson with a coach and drills and a ‘good work-out’ all for $10.00 so I decide to go.  A couple days ahead I went over to a school playground and hit balls against a concrete wall so I wouldn’t embarrass myself too much at the lesson.  A lot of good that did.

I walked on the court and realized these chicks were all ahead of my game by a long shot (oops, another pun).  So after I was corrected out loud, multiple times, by the coach on issues like where I was standing, or not following the game pattern or whatever, I was tempted to leave because I really thought this was perhaps the wrong place for me to be. :)  But I hung in.  Then as I walked by him, the coach said, out loud in front of everyone, “hey, let me see that archive!” as he reached for my ancient ProKennex racket from the early ’80s that I bought for about $30.00 at Kmart.  “You gotta get a new grip on that thing…or at least get it taped.  Taping only costs a couple bucks.  Hey Allen, bring your racket over here and show her.”  Allen brought over his $200.00 toy and let me hold the handle while everyone watched.  (OK, thanks coach, I feel like a moron now).

So I decided that to save the only dignity I had left, I would fight for every single ball that came anywhere near me, and a particularly mean shot bounced over - one of those evil ones that drop in real close to the net, forcing you to run like crazy to attempt to scoop it up.  I shifted into 5th and gave my life to get to that ball, whacked it back up and over the net with such ferocity that my feet somehow got tangled up, and before I knew what happened I fell so hard on my backside that I just about saw stars.  I yanked myself back to an upright position in half-a-heartbeat and by now, all ten people on the court were doing the obligatory, “are you okay?”  “are you okay?”  “that was a great tuck and roll move!”  “are you okay?”…I mumbled something like, “thank God for Advil.”

But hey, I’m back in the game.  What’s there to fear now?  

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 12:28 am and is filed under Life in the Fishbowl: ministry wives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.