Point of View: Just One More Game
We took delivery of a Ping-Pong table the other evening, and it is sitting handsomely in the newly painted, well-lit basement.
But even as it was being put together, Mary was icing the small of her back, which had become severely knotted after having engaged in a Herculean spring cleanup that included laudable defenses against the legions of ever-advancing pachysandra, armed only with an edger, and several frontal assaults upon the dandelions that reappear every spring in our backyard.
Larry Penny said in a recent column that you’ll never fully excise dandelions in a lifetime, but Mary was, as I say, undaunted.
“Who are you going to play with?” Geary Gubbins, from whom I’d bought the all-weather table, and who was, thankfully, putting it together, asked. “With my wife,” I said, “as soon as she is able.”
I fear, however, I’m like the man who loved Dickens when it comes to Ping-Pong. I’ll humor you at first, only to tell you there’s no means of escape once you begin to tire of the endless rallies. “Just one more game, just one more game. . . . We’ll have food sent down. . . .”
Speaking of obsessions (and Mary is still number one, after which come tennis, crosswords, and Ping-Pong), I have become somewhat intrigued lately by golf, even as I continue to say I hate the game. Why then do I find myself every now and then addressing a nonexistent ball with hips facing forward, shoulders tilted just so, and right knee slightly flexed? It’s what I gleaned from a recent lesson my brother-in-law took and I wrote about. After he’d left the practice room, I asked the pro if I could try one, and, clasping a pitching wedge lightly, lofted a ball from the carpet up into a screen about 12 feet away, straight as a die!
I don’t know . . . it’s not content, it’s form. Form is content. Which is to say that, in the end I suspect I don’t care so much how I do, whether it be in tennis or in golf, but how I look.
How do I look? That is the question. And, in fact, the one I posed to my eldest daughter when, on her wedding day, she descended the stairs in all her radiance. In my defense, I was wearing a silken tie that she’d picked out for me, so I thought it wasn’t untoward to ask how I looked. And I’m sure I said that she looked great too.
I told Rob Balnis, our physical therapist-trainer, recently that I hoped he’d soon clear Mary, who I said had been on injured reserve lately, to play Ping-Pong. He smiled at the pro sports allusion, but I gathered, knowing as he does how obsessed I can get, he wouldn’t bring her back too soon. Which is good. I can wait. A few more days anyway.