Point of View: Range, Range . . .

“Old age should burn and rave at close of day,” Dylan Thomas said, and so I’m playing tennis this evening with the Wednesday group — 16, sometimes 20 of us doing battle in the waning light.

Come back with your racket or upon it, I imagine Mary saying. 

I keep a compound-fractured one by me at the office — a reminder that I should sometimes temper the burning and raving. I should add that that wreckage was wreaked when I was a mere 72. I’ve matured since — I no longer blame myself so sorely if I lose, just my partner. 

Lately, I’ve been looking to Jim Nicoletti as a guide — he has that intense calm that I aspire to, taking dead aim, as Harvey Penick said in his little red book about golf, though it holds for tennis too. 

Take dead aim. You can see it in the eyes of the Little League pitcher, Jack Dickinson, in Craig Macnaughton’s photo for the sports pages last week. Jodie Foster once said pretty much the same thing at a Yale University graduation, though she was speaking as an archer, with bow extended, sighting down the arrow’s shaft toward the target.

Take dead aim, she said, and you’ll be fine, in whatever you choose to do.

Frankly, it’s just fun still to be able to play, whether taking dead aim, or not, as is often the case with us. 

“How dull it is to pause, to make an end, / To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!” 

“Though much range is taken, quick hands abide. . . .” 

That’s Tennyson on tennis! On Ulysses actually.

It does occur to me every now and then that there’s a wide world — not to mention the universe and unnumbered galaxies and black holes — out there beyond my outdoor shower.

And while much of it I find uninviting, there are still broad vistas in America yet to see — breathtaking views of mountains, canyons, rivers, plains, and valleys that are bound to knock my socks off and remind me that, although a defending club Class B champion, I am but a speck — a speck beckoned by Mary and tennis.