Memories Across the Fence

We’ve come to the time of year where I always find myself becoming nostalgic…and a little PTSD’d as well. You see, I live right behind a high school in full view of the tennis courts. When I see the teens out there whacking at those yellow balls, I’m immediately transported back to my own tennis team days.

Being on the team was a complicated thing for me. Yeah, it was not only something I enjoyed doing, and it got me out of taking phys ed classes (if you were on a varsity team, you were exempt); but it posed not a few difficulties as well. The conditioning part I really hated. I mean, finger-tip push-ups? Really? All that did was hurt my thumbs. Then there was the running. It’s not that I wasn’t in shape to run, but I simply couldn’t do any continuous distance at all. I didn’t know it then, but it turns out that I’ve been a life-long sufferer of exercise-induced asthma. If I could have brief pauses to regain my breathing before the difficulties kicked in, I was good to go — which is why I could still run playing tennis and basketball. But put me on a track and make me run more than fifty meters without a pause and I’d be gasping for air. Coach just thought I was lazy, but, as he liked me, I got a little bit of latitude.

Coach was a cool guy most of the time. He was one of my favorite teachers. A civil war buff, he was a natural to teach us 19th Century U.S. history. One class he even took us all out to the football field to fire off some black-powder rifles. Of course he got in trouble for that. Even though it was over twenty years before Columbine, school administrators still had a problem with people bringing and discharging firearms on school grounds. Weird. Anyway…Coach’s weakness was that he’d only recently come to the game of tennis. Which meant that we players had a lot more knowledge about the game than he did. It was so funny when he’d try to position us when we played doubles, putting us in places on the court where it was easy for opponents to fire a tennis ball past us, instead of accepting our experience of how far and fast we could reach to get returns back.

So, when I look out at those tennis-playing teens across the street, I remember. It’s a good memory. ‘course, when I watch them, I also see all these things that they do so wrong. I want to go over there and teach them, but it’s not my place. Even so, I know that they will take away memories that will follow them through life. It’s not just the sport, but the shared experience with comrades. They are going to have good times and they are going to have disappointments. Mostly, though, they are having fun…just as they should be. Yay for them.