Gino says the new racket won’t make any difference, that no matter how well-engineered the tool, the flaws of its wielder remain, unchanged.
How true, yet he’s also wrong: My racket lives, it has its own life. I am not the agent, an observer almost as it sweeps through its arc. The frame’s light and lively, the strings loosely strung, and the handle feels right in the heel of my hand. Ping goes the ball, ping go the strings of my heart.
Perhaps the bloom will fade, but for now I’m riding the crest, having shed 10 years in a day. I let it do what it wants, I get out of the way.
“I’ll name it for you,” I said to O’en, snowy O’en, this morning as he lay by the court. “There’s Excalibur and Wonderboy, I know, but ‘Snowy O’en’ it is.”
It’s been three years since I’ve felt so lithe, so blithe, since Gary Bowen and I, in our mid-70s, won East Hampton Indoor Tennis’s men’s B doubles tournament. I sailed home that day along Springy Banks Road, very much in tune.
I’ve felt that way off the court lately too, the grass and everything being so green and serene. You never want it to end. We’ve returned to Eden.
O’en was banished the other day, not for eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge (though he may have chewed some of its bark), but for digging a hole as he went for a mole. On hearing my cri de cur, Mary sprang forth, and, as she is wont to do on many an occasion, using clods that had overgrown the slate paths, smoothed it over.
His exile was brief, for it’s not paradise without him, black holes notwithstanding. Snowy O’en. Ping go the strings of my heart.