Sorry About The Chunks

We should have cleaned up the coconut water.  Why?  Because it had chunks in it.  It was only a little spill – nothing like my water bottle dumpage onto the leather handbag.  The can of coconut water was sitting on the ground next to the bench.  An errant ball knocked it over.  The contents began to trickle out.  I ran over and righted the can before too much escaped.  We evaluated collateral damage – tennis bags, handbags, coats – and there was none.  So we resumed playing.

I didn’t even think about the coconut water when it was time to leave the court.  I’d forgotten the spill entirely, which seems consistent with the state of my overall mental capacity.  I can’t even remember the score of the game if a particular point goes on too long.  We all picked up our belongings, exchanged greetings with our tennis friends who were taking over the court, and left the club.

When I say “chunks” what I mean is little bits of coconut that are included in this particular brand of coconut water.  They’re not really like the coconut shavings that you’d find on a cake or pastry.  They’re small, white, oddly shaped pieces of coconut meat that, yes, could be mistaken for regurgitated matter if you just saw them strewn in a small puddle of water, especially if the telltale coconut water can was removed from the scene.  Which it was, when we left the court.  The only thing remaining was a little puddle full of chunks.

The next group of players was concerned, but not aghast at the puddle.  This I found out later because I played with them a few days hence.  They know all of us who had just played before them, and they knew that none of us would vomit on the court and just leave it.  I suppose there was a part of them that assumed there was a perfectly good explanation for the mess left on the floor.  But still, they erred on the side of caution and treated it like vomit.  Which is to say, they kept all their belongings on the other side of the bench and expressed a collective disgust among themselves.

And when they finished playing, they, too, left the coconut water puddle untouched.

Even hearing this much of the story, days later, made me laugh. I’m not trying to make excuses when I say that the amount of coconut water that had spilled was small and the chunks were few.  If I had come onto the court next, I, too, would have thought someone had upchucked, but in a small way, like a hairball.

No, no, they told me.  The puddle had expanded – maybe it had seeped into the court and spread.  It was not a small, tidy dribbling as I had remembered.  It was a big expanse of ick.

The third group of women to play on Court 3 that day did not even consider that there might be an innocent explanation for the chunk-ridden puddle they found next to the bench.  I was told that they were absolutely horrified to discover that someone had obviously vomited on the court and just left it there. 

I don’t know who those women are, but I want to let them know we’re sorry.  We should have cleaned up the spilled coconut water.  I don’t know if any of them will ever read this, but I know I would be relieved to learn that something I thought was vile and inconsiderate was really, in truth, only inconsiderate.  And we didn’t even mean to be that.  We simply forgot. 

Food Is ... Not Sex

 Sometimes when Shelley plays, she does this charming little thing where she has us all touch our racquet heads to the net and rub gently back and forth to get good energy into our collective game.  She usually suggests this when someone is playing particularly poorly and thus feeling bad about herself. 

This was the case recently, when Debi the Sub and I were playing against Shelley and Kelley.  Debi the Sub and I were not in our groove and our posture was taking a hit with each point we lost.  Once down four games, we were all droopy and dejected and Shelley called us all to the net for some Tennis Mojo.  We all placed our racquet heads on the net and rubbed them from side-to-side.  Then, in unison, we lifted the racquets off the net and high into the air as Shelley cheered, “Go, tennis ladies!”

“I hate being called a lady,” someone said.  So we put our racquets back on the net and lifted them in unison to the chant, “Go, MILFs!”

However, two of the players weren’t Mothers.  So we decided to modify it to WILFs.  But that made someone else visibly uncomfortable.  So Debi the Sub suggested a whole new tact and we rubbed our racquets on the net and yelled, “Food is Good!” and everyone was really happy and comfortable with that, so we went back to playing. 

We all felt a little like deserters for our unbridled allegiance toward food over sexuality.  We laughed about it, but it was not a mirthful laugh.  We played, but something had shifted. 

Our game did turn around after that chant, but I’m still not so sure it was really worth it.

The Good, The Bad and The Keratin

I just sat down to write about my Keratin treatment.  About how I got it on a whim yesterday at the salon, and how I left the salon with pin straight hair that completely freaked me out, even though my stylist warned me not to judge it until the next day, once it had been washed and some of the natural wave returned.  And about how she also warned me to be extremely careful, in the hours before washing, not to wear hats or use barrettes or even allow the handle of my handbag to touch it on my shoulder because any little impression on it could (and probably would) remain as a permanent dent in the finished product.

I was going to write about how I woke up this morning and washed it, and then spent about seven minutes with the blow-dryer and ended up with a luscious, silky, wavy hairdo that was completely devoid of frizz and made me look like a (middle-aged) Breck Girl.  I was going to recount how I showed up at tennis with my new coif and how afterwards I asked Gina to take a picture of it with her iPhone so I could send it to my Curly Girl Friends so they could see the miracle that had taken place. 

I would have added the part where, embarrassed to be posing for pictures in the parking lot, I yelled out to Melissa on her way in that I had just gotten Keratin, and how Melissa called me a traitor (because she is a Curly Girl) and how I smiled and agreed.  And then how Melissa said she was envious because I would now be taken more seriously, and how Shelley said, “Oh my God, it’s only hair,” and how Melissa and I shook our heads knowingly, indicating that we understood that Shelley was right in principal, but in actual fact, Straight Girls do get taken more seriously than Curly Girls, and wondering whether we should tell Shelley that it’s not because she wears her nightclothes out during the day, or that she didn’t go to Harvard that she doesn’t get taken seriously, it’s because she, too, is a Curly Girl, and that’s just how life is for us. 

I would have tried to capture how this hair treatment unlocked something in me that made me feel more confident and outgoing, funnier and more charming, but I would have stopped myself, thinking that’s silly – hair doesn’t really do all that.

I’m not sure how long it would have taken me to get to any of that, or even if I could have thrown in the line about how this feels like the Botox of hair treatments (which may have seemed random and out of context), because I stopped writing after the first sentence to check online and see what exactly Keratin was – scientifically – and after I’d found that out, I just went to one more site to read about it as a hair treatment, and it was there that I found a post from a woman who was crying for help because after her Keratin treatment she started losing her hair.  Fast.

Of course, I had to scroll down and read more of the posts and was heartened to learn that many people responded with sensible advice for her.  But even more responded that the exact same thing had happened to them, and as I read I could actually feel the sweat develop on my palms and my breath start to shorten in my chest and I thought to myself, “Oh, gee…I’m going down.”

I stopped reading and reverted to skimming, and then once my anxiety registered an 8.0 on the Richter Scale, I found my way to my husband and curled up on his lap and told him I’d made a terrible mistake that there seemed no way to undo and began to moan about how scared I was that I was now going to lose my hair.

“You’ve been doing so well, today,” he said, “what happened?”

I told him about my time on the internet and he attempted to talk me off the ledge.  “You have to do this, don’t you?” he said.  “You can’t just let a good thing be good for very long.”

And I nodded, yes, but I didn’t have to.  Because we both know that’s exactly what I do.  I did it today, during tennis, when we were up two games right off the bat.  We ended up losing the set 2-6 or something.  And I do it in my mind all day long – spinning off different horror scenarios because I’ve just found myself singing joyfully, gleefully, to We Won’t Get Fooled Again at 60 miles an hour after a surprisingly pleasant errand of returns to Marshall’s.

We came back in the second set this morning, and I was able to leave my husband’s arms tonight and come back here and write – things that I don’t think I could have done even just a year ago.  But still, it’s vexing.  How the mind works.  How it knows the job it has to do and it goes at it like a steamroller.  How no amount of tennis lessons or expert advice is ever going to touch that steamroller.  Only the practice of learning to leave well enough alone.

89 Minutes Is Not Enough

 I’m not going to belabor the fact that I’d been waiting 13 days for my Wednesday Clinic to reconvene.  Thirteen long, arduous, tennis-deprived days.  Well, they weren’t all tennis-deprived, but they weren’t my Wednesday Clinic, which is it’s own little bit of heaven on earth.

The Wednesday Clinic starts at 9 a.m. and goes until 10:30.  When we were The Monday Clinic, we started at noon.  I liked that because it’s hard for me to get anywhere at 9:00.  Also, it forced me to be extra productive in the morning, accomplishing two or three tasks before I even walked out the door.  Now, with this early start time, I can barely get my shoelaces tied before it’s time to go.  I’m punctual to begin with, but I really hate being late for tennis.  When I’m driving down that last big stretch of road and the clock says 8:59 I panic.  Even though I know I’m only two minutes away – 89 minutes of tennis is not enough.  I feel deprived if I don’t get the full ninety.

I walked in today at 8:55 and I was the first one there.  I knew Laura The Tennis Pro would be late because she’d texted me from the road.  Rain, traffic, probably an accident somewhere.  She said she’d be a few minutes late.  But Marybeth was also late, and she’s always there before anyone.

Gina left me a voicemail that said something like, “I know it’s inconceivable to you, but I actually forgot about our clinic today.  But I’m on my way, just running a little behind.” 

Inconceivable doesn’t even begin to describe it.  It startles me anew every time I realize I am the only one counting the hours (from, like, Sunday) until Wednesday Clinic begins.  I know I’m not the only one having fun out there, but everyone else seems to have a certain perspective on the game that I just can’t seem to access.

I worked really hard today to stay chill today about not getting my 90 Laura-the-Tennis-Pro Minutes.  Maryanne and I played singles until Gina showed up.  Then the three of us hit for a while.  Laura didn’t get there until 10 and Marybeth bailed altogether, never showing up at all. 

Once Laura came, we played doubles until 10:30.  I tried to stay really present and make the most out of the short time we had together, and for the most part, I did. I didn’t feel like it was enough – although I never do. 

When my husband was studying for his yoga certifications, he would come home and espouse all this Buddhist banter that made me nearly insane.  “The world comes from you, not at you,” he would say.  “If you want something in your life, you have to create it first for another person.”  And, “there are no such things as accidents – we have created all of our circumstances from seeds that we’ve planted in the past.” 

I’m sure a lot of that has merit – probably even truth (with a capital T) – but it didn’t take me long to start rolling my eyes every time he said such a thing.  Yet here I am now, trying to understand why it never seems enough for me – my tennis time.  Why I constantly feel a deficit.  Why, no matter how many minutes or hours or days I’m playing, I don’t ever feel sated.  I’m sure there’s some yogic principle to explain this, but for the life of me, I don’t know what it is.