Point of View: Hold the Apotheosis

I thought briefly of saying, “On my backhand” when asked the other day during our weekly editorial conference what I was working on, but demurred.

It is true though — I am working on my backhand, and, moreover, I think I’ve experienced a breakthrough. You know how it takes a while sometimes — about 66 years, in my case — for the right mnemonic word or words to sink in. (Wait, there’s an ant on my desk, zigzagging along agitatedly, lifting his tiny antennae up at the edge of my calculator as if he were calculating. As if to say, “So much to learn, so little time.”)

First, there was all this talk about how I was doing it wrong, wrong, wrong. Stepping when I should be

. . . what? I wasn’t sure. I asked a fellow clinic-taker. He said he thought I should be turning my shoulder.

“He said I should turn my shoulder,” I said to our teacher when she came over to us.

“No, turn your body!” she said.

Then, all of a sudden, after a half-hour or more of this, it began to click. Ah, turn! Turn instead of taking that big initial sideways step, which had been depriving me of power.

“Turn,” I said to myself when the ball was on the way. I turned, and the feet, the wayward feet, followed — in position to step forward as the racket, which I’d brought back with my right hand as I had turned, came through.

“And hold!” she said, her racket rising following contact.

“And hold,” I said.

“Turn, step, and hold,” she said.

“Turn, step, and hold,” I said.

See Spot turn, step, and hold. Turn, Spot. Turn, step, and hold. . . . It was kind of like that. Like the Dalai Lama saying, when asked by the hot dog vendor what he wanted, “Make me one with everything.”

“But hold the apotheosis!” I would add, more aware now, I think, than ever before, that there’s so much to learn, so little time.