TENNIS. ANYONE?
Adapted from Brazil Times blog of October 14, 2008
(because I still think of myself as not gotten any older!)
It is probably because I don’t know much about my father’s youth that I have trouble seeing him as a tennis player. He told me once about a certain day when he was seventeen -- before the Depression, before The War, when he was still a promising athlete. He spoke of a perfect spring day, of playing tennis, of having won the match. He told me:
“Somehow I have never thought of myself as being any older than I was on that day.”
I had such a day when I was nineteen. It could have been yesterday, maybe it was. I was picking up a suit at the cleaners for a date with a beautiful girl. It was one of those purely perfect days – perfect temperature, perfect humidity, just enough clouds floating overhead. I had a brand-new, straight-off-the-showroom-floor Buick convertible with a mystic blue-green color I never saw again or could describe. [It could do 90 on the highway; but, that is a different story.]
Somehow I have never thought of myself as being any older than I was on that day.
As of the day I post this blog, October 14 2008, I have somehow lived through exactly sixty-five years. There has been now-forgotten pain and unforgettable blessings, incalculable failures, marriage to a woman I would not have lived it without, and five things I seem to have done right. However, like the fiddler on the roof, I don’t remember growing older. All I remember for sure is the “sun rise, sun set” part. Whatever happened to that 18 year old with his perfect day? How and when did he get to be 65 [OK, now 78]?
Tennis, anyone?
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