Pickleball and . . . literature?

 For 75 minutes on Saturday morning I practiced PB with a friend, volleying, serving and returning, and backhands. "Yes! " would ring out in mock triumph as she put yet another slant shot off to one side of the court causing me to run way over there for a weak, lunging return, and then hit the wide-open court as I desperately tried to reverse course and run back into the play. I would hit volley shots at her that would handcuff her between forehand/backhand stabs at the ball and laugh as she quixotically looked at her paddle that had just failed her by trying to return a chicken-wing shot off its narrow banding edge. In between faux triumphs we would discuss Rick Atkinson's fascinating opening volume in the Revolution Trilogy which we both are reading, The Redcoats Are Coming. "Atkinson has a felicity for turning history into literature," says the Washington Post. No score was kept, only momentary scores were settled. I love pickleball.

Sunday, as showers threatened and the sky spit raindrops, I showed up at general PB Drop-In and filled out a 4-some on a water-slicked court hoping to quickly get in a couple of games before a deluge made playing untenable. I thought I was being handy by immediately filling out a 3-some even though our two opponents were half my age and the best players (one by far) of the 12 toilers playing on three courts. The game went quickly as Pen put his wicked spin serve onto the wet court where it sliced wickedly away off the moist veneer of the hard court and weak lunging rally returns were put away decidedly by Player at the Kitchen Line with triumph aplomb. We went up for faux "good game" platitudes at 1-11 and I drolly said, "Work up a sweat, you two?" The losing two of us expectantly waited for Pen and Player to split up with us in some more equitable matchup that would, you know, be more fun but Pen and Player wanted to remain together. Okay. We became a mere ballboy and ballgirl for game two chasing down smashed winners so they could thereupon perform more spectacular kitchen putaways and spin-serves that actually curved wickedly in the wet-laden air from "out" to "in." Quickly dispensing with the false platitudes at the net following the 0-11 shellacking (Pickled!) I kept on going, got into my car and drove home to finish reading my depressing Thomas Hardy novel where the heroine gets hanged for murdering her rapist and her husband, the perfect man, runs off with her sister, equally beautiful but half his age, at the exact moment that poor Tessie is strung up for her "crimes." "'Justice' was done, and the President of the Immortals in the Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess." There was more profit in reading those lines than playing those games. I hate pickleball.

Pickleball Musings.

 Pickleball Musings. I'm creating a Frankenstein monster. For three weeks I have been helping a woman new to pickleball (she started 5 weeks ago she claims) who is younger than me by several years and much more fit (she runs for things but doesn't always get there) by practicing with her one-on-one for 75 minutes two or three times a week. Decades ago she played a little tennis.

She asked me to help her with her serve, which never went in, and her game which was all over the place. Serving rules in PB are dumb, so I dumbed it down for her. Just drop it (and then all the fussy rules don't apply) I told her, and hit it on the bounce up into that big rectangle over there diagonally and you'll instantly improve your game 100%. Because you can't score if you don't get your serve in, period.

But I want a deep serve (to keep her opponent back and on the defensive) she said. Just get it in, I said, and deepness, and a good shortness which is a tricky change of pace and can produce an ace, will come. That's what we did the first week; using my 8 practice balls I would demonstrate putting 22 of 24 soft serves in, and that was 22 serves I could pick up points on. She is a quick study, and being competitive, she simplified her serve by converting to a bounce serve and ditching the awkward high-shoulder drop, dropping the ball from waist-high instead (better control as to where the ball will bounce up to) and softened her service strike by foregoing smash or spin attempts, and now she never misses putting a serve in. And once or twice she gets an "ace" in each game because her serve suddenly bounces short and is unreachable.

Then we worked on rallying, off our serves. We don't keep score, we just serve to each other and hit it back and forth, back and forth and back and forth till it goes out or in my case, she hits a slant shot to the other half court on my side (she's good at those and never puts this "touch" shot out) that I eschew running for because I'm old, heavy and tired. She always pulls up short and cries, "Yes!" when she does this which makes me chuckle.

Then to get back, when she serves next I hit the return low and hard to the spot she just vacated as she moves towards the center of her court (i.e. behind her) and watch as she reverses, sprints for it, lunges and, barely missing it, cries out in exaggerated anguish. It's fun and funny.

So in two weeks she picked up serving, returning and rallying, and added her natural talent at slant shots (balls off to the side). But her backhand was weak and she jumped at the ball, waving at it in a backhanded stab that rarely made it over the net. Can't generate any power if your feet are off the ground, I told her. Plus she wasn't getting set for the shot, she was always moving towards the ball but never "arriving at it." So we worked on that this week and she came up with, on her own, incorporating a 2-handed backhand, which a few players have but not many. Her BH improved exponentially as we practiced (she got properly set by using the 2-handed technique) and today I watched as she played at Senior Drop-In games looking like Evonne Goolagong raking double-fisted backhands by Chris Evert, one after another. In only five weeks, I wondered?

I've been working for 11 long months to get to where I actually win occasionally, and I "only" lose 9-11 to the immortals now at Drop-In (being, of course, partnered with an immortal whom I cause to lose alongside of me) instead of 2-11. I've been getting backhanded compliments lately, Peter your game has really improved! Now I look at my "student" and wonder if I'll be able to beat her in August even. Didn't the Frankenstein monster kill its creator?

Back

 I lost control of my first blog in December of 2020 because, well, suddenly I couldn't get into it with my Google username and password.  For years my computer had just brought up my blog and I could just click into it but all of a sudden, no more.   I have no idea what my Google name is much less my  password.  

For awhile I published an adjacent blog that no one could see (except for one sibling) because, well, it was insecure or something. I have no idea.

Anyway, suddenly in a corner of my computer ,I found a link to DC Spinster so I'm back for how long I don't know.  My adjacent blog, with a few dozen posts, seems to have gone off to somewhere from a few months' disuse, maybe I'll find it again also.  So I'm baaack, for now anyway.

I 'm heavy into pickleball now. It's taken me 11 months, since when I first picked up a paddle in Sugust last year till now, to get anywhere near decent. 

Two Memories

 I'm trying to remember occurrences in this year that wasn't. when the coronavirus closed down our lives in March and the USA's non-response to it was akin to allowing the Japanese to invade America in 1942 and now they're poised upon the heights of Arlington ready to overwhelm DC on the morrow. I guess FDR wouldn't be one of the Triumphant Threesome off Presidents if he had followed Trump's incompetent response to everything (which gets lots of people killed) and thrown up his hands and said, The Virginia and Maryland governors need to act and if they need combat boots or web belts for their militias, I could assign my son-in-law to seek contracts worldwide to help procure those.

My last post detailed the one thing during this year-that-wasn't that was normal that I indulged in. Movie-going, I went to see Parasite on Valentine's Day, the Academy Award winning film that, well, sucked. I got incredibly sick that night that made me see God and for the next two weeks I thought I might die as I coughed my lungs out. I wonder what I had, but there were no reliable or helpful tests then, despite the president's subsequent claim that If you want a test you can get a test.

So now it's time to remember my two most memorable moments this year without referring to my daily notes, and I can do that. I went to a wedding party in January in the District that was thrown by a supermarket magnate that was way over the top; I boogied with my love and barely made the last subway to Virginia and expected moreso the rest of the year. But no. the coronavirus intervened and way later, in July when we were all housebound, I come out of my house on July 4th and saw 500 feet up a B-29 bomber fly over my house escorted by four P-51 Mustangs, all restored WW2 warplanes which had flown on Independence Day over the National Mall and were headed to IAD then, and in that instant I thought of my dad who endured 180 days of intense combat in two battles in the Pacific and my mother who got out of her small-town as a teenager by traveling to CA to work in the war industries (where she met my dad at an USO dance).

It's December . . .

 It's December finally in the year that wasn't.  The time for a summing up of the year past, a making of lists.

Except there aren't many or any noteworthy personal events in this year that never should have happened; it's like God stepped away for a moment and got distracted.  What would I list as something I did, because I never went anywhere hardly, or did anything practically, once the virus took hold, and what I think happened this year, my reality, is regarded by the Trumpite side of my family as my fantasy, induced by osmosis apparently by my location not only within the Northeast Bubble but actually inside the Beltway. 

Of course, they live in the real fantasy world, not me, because I operate on real information that I acquire from the Washington Post, the New York Times, MSNBC, CNN and my further reading in books and magazines as filtered through my education at boarding school, a state university and a top ten law school which taught me critical thinking skills to augment my life experiences acquired from being a ski bum for four years, a policeman for nine years and a lawyer for 25 years.  So what did I accomplish or do in this DOA year?

I went to one movie, on Valentine's Day, Parasite, because it won the Academy Award for being the best picture, where I got really sick by that night with a respiratory ailment that kept me down for two weeks and that I still don't believe I've fully recovered from. The movie was, well, awful and the illness was, well, I'll never know what I actually had because in Trump's America nothing is as it was before him and not for the better by a long shot.

How Many

I called a friend today, a former running buddy who got married and moved out of DC; he asked me how things were going. I said, "Everything sucks." 

I was losing money in my retirement fund, down 45% this year alone despite this month which was the most robust in 30 years, I ate my Thanksgiving dinner alone (oh, doesn't that warm your heart Sharon!) and the holiday season was upon us which keeps me depressed from Veterans Day till March. You see, I have 3 children, all now in their early thirties, who threw me over and ceased all communication with me or any Lamberton due to the divorce two decades ago thanks to her insidious, invidious utilization of PAS back then when they were tender children and my three children all have their birthdays in January or February.

This makes me sad every holiday season. So my friend, a very smart man, embarked upon an enlightening discussion thinly disguised as a quest to find the winter of my discontent and he asked me to list three things that were good in my life now.

I was hard pressed to say what made me feel uplifted currently but I finally settled upon the very important and blessed situations that a) I have enough food to eat (no food insecurity); b) I have enough liquids stored to drink for several months if necessary; and c) all of my five siblings are alive (which is more than I know about my three children). We simultaneously decided that I wished I knew more about the welfare of my real family (my kids) during this lugubrious season; and I decided further that it would be decent or human to know not if I have any grandchildren, but how many I have, and how they are.

Very Unusual Human Beings

 This Thanksgiving I was home since I am not traveling in deference to the over-stressed US health care system, thanks to the criminally negligent pandemic nonresponse on the part of President Baby Huey. At Noon I went to take out a pizza from the Lost Dog Pizzeria in Westover but it was closed for the holiday, although several Uber-Eats drivers were hanging around with putative takeout orders, wondering what was going on. 

I waited awhile in my car to see if anyone I knew showed up. Nobody I recognized came by so I went home to cook a solitary meal for myself.

The meal was fine, a pork roast slathered in BBQ sauce plus fixings. I ate it wondering how many grandchildren I might have, but I also knew two immutable things: my ex-wife who turned our children against me through PAS when they were minors (a form of child abuse) would never tell me if one of them suffered a tragedy; or if I as a parent would ever be informed by her or them of the pleasure and pride of indulging in any grandchildren of any of these three now-adults might have had by now.

I wouldn't want to be my ex-wife, Sharon R. Lightbourne (nee Sharon Rogers), good luck to her at St. Peters gate! And as for JJ&D, I wonder how any of them could have accepted such largess as their Lamberton grandmother provided for them through her own frugal sacrifices as a widow and still diss all Lambertons for these last two decades as being unworthy of having any gratitude towards or communication with, I would have thought that accepting such a sum of money (about 100K each in trust money) from so apparently foul a source would have compelled them to either refuse it or cause them to turn it over to charity; those three now fully mature male adults are unfortunately very unusual human beings, persons I wouldn't recognize now as having had any upbringing influence from me as to what they have become from all appearances.