Point of View: A Good Thing Going

“Teach me a kick serve,” I said to Lisa Jones, “and it will be the last piece in the jeweled crown that is my doubles tennis game.”

I tried it in our group last night, with middling results, and by the end of the musical chairs — we play best-of-seven games with six or so partners throughout the course of the two hours — I was, as has been the case the last two times I’ve played, pretty much exhausted. 

Yet, by morning, I was on the road to being reconstituted, less inclined to wax maudlin on the ebbing of energy, and ready to fail again. 

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Tad Friend, who wrote of his revived squash game in The New Yorker last week, says they are his favorite words from Beckett. More hopeful, I think, than his “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

But just you wait. The Steelers will be back. I had hoped to conjure a win in Denver the other day by catching a toilet roll Mary had tossed me from the front hall closet and doing a back flip onto the seat, where I proceeded to do the crossword in its entirety — usually a sure sign of victory — but no. No matter. Try again.

A little adjusting, perhaps a slight inward turn of the grip and some more spin on the brush-through, and some more practice ought to yield the desired result, which, of course, is to utterly dominate and crow incessantly.

Jack Gilbert, the late poet (from Pittsburgh, as a matter of fact), said we become too intelligent as we age — that we become moderate. So, I must improve, I can’t improve, I’ll improve.

Rusty Drumm used to say to me, “Moderation in all things . . . including moderation.” As in don’t be too moderate. When I complained to him once about being denied by management what I thought was money coming to me for unused vacation time, he said it had never occurred to him not to use his vacation time.

He didn’t fret, as I did — though somewhat less now, thanks to him — about indispensability or whether we were having fun yet. He had fun and he was indispensable.

He had a good thing going.