Point of View: What Makes It Fun
I want to begin by thanking our granddaughter Ella, who’s 8, for having turned my wife’s Ping-Pong game around, for having raised her Ping-Pong self-esteem (the fiery competitive spirit she’s always had) so that Mary and I are now on an even keel Ping-Pong-wise.
This is very important to me because she usually creams me in backgammon and, whenever we can find the rules, in gin. I have no card sense, none, though I will play these games to humor her. But it’s batting balls back and forth that I really love, and Ella, bless you for having said to Mimi, as you call her, that getting a Ping-Pong table was the best thing we ever did.
It’s a state-of-the-art royal blue Kettler that Geary Gubbins somehow put together in the fall after we’d had the basement brightened, neatened (the 10-year statute of limitations having run out on her brother’s tools), and dried out a bit.
I had envisioned unending games, and had bought a space heater toward that end, but until Ella entered the equation, the handsome table wasn’t used all that much because Mary — despite the fact that our games were always close — thought she wasn’t up to my speed.
Ella proposed a freer format. One could serve twice, as in tennis, and serves were alternated point after point. Games were to be to 10, not to 21, and if you could fetch back onto your opponent’s side of the net a ball that had hit the floor, whether simply by way of a lifted shot or by caroming the ball off a wall, as in squash, that would count.
Thus less constricted, Mary, with whom I’ve always batted ideas back and forth in somewhat similar fashion, began to play with more verve, and the other night, after she’d creamed me 10-3, and as I was muttering to myself, she went upstairs to give Ella the news.
I won one that night, she won two, whereupon she said it was over, which was fine. I was delighted. Whatever rules she wants to play by. Perhaps more will be added as we go along. That’s what kids do, make them up as they go, and that’s what makes it fun.