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.