Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Wendy's World

My daughter and I played racquetball last week. I had never played until this summer but my daughter had taken a class in college and thought it was a lot of fun. We need some exercise and I thought it looked way more fun than tennis  mainly because the court consists of six walls and there's less need to chase stray balls. (The way Rose and I play, there's bound to be lots of stray balls.)

Let me explain about racquetball. Being in the court is like being in a

closed cereal box. The floor is 20 by 40 feet and the walls are about 20 feet high. The rules are rather convoluted, but basically you whack the fire out of a little rubber ball and hope your opponent can't manage to scramble around to return it before it bounces a time or two. To make it more challenging (cause we seriously needed more challenge), you can return off any wall. Notice I said "you" can return cause we do well to whack the ball when it's coming straight at us. We miss a lot of returns. We don't keep score, try to hit it so the other has a chance to return and just kind of take turns serving.

If there were an announcer doing a play-by-play of our games, it would go something like this.

And player one is set to serve. She drops the ball, swings, and OH! it's a

miss. Alright, she's getting ready again, here we go, swing and it's good!

Player two gets ready for the return, swings and WOW! it's a return. It's

going up, it hit the ceiling, bounced back down and never made it to the

back wall. Player one gears up to hit it anyway. She swings and whacks herself in the arm with her racquet. That's gotta hurt!

Player two is getting ready to serve. It's off the back wall, bounces once,

twice,  six times and player one is getting ready to swing. It's good!

Well, it's all the way to the back wall and that's good. Player one makes a

run for it and crashes into the wall. Looks like she broke a wing. That's

gotta hurt!

Player one serves again, it's off the back wall, off the front wall and into

player two's ear. That's gotta hurt!

I should stop here and say that I knew we were in trouble when we went to the court for the first time. The front walls of these courts are made of glass so it's possible to watch others play. Rose walked into the glass wall, mistaking it for the door. Twice.

Sometimes other players stop to watch us play, just to cool off for a second and have a good laugh. Sometimes we watch others, hoping for instruction and inspiration. It goes something like this.

"Ready to get back to our court?"

"I'm ready!"

And player one gears up to serve. She really hit that ball. It's off the back wall, it's coming straight at player one. Oh, that's gotta hurt.

"That's going to bruise, huh?"

"Probably, how's your wing?"

"Hurts. How's your ear?"

"Still ringing."

"Wanna play some more?"

"Of course."

And so it goes. We spent an hour and a half on the court, sometimes watching others, sometimes pausing to talk, sometimes scrambling after the ball and injuring ourselves. But it was all in fun and it makes for great

mother-daughter time. More than that, it makes for great best friend time.

It occurs to me how fortunate I am in my life. I think sometimes we get so

caught up in the day-to-day stuff that we forget what's important. The time clock at work becomes such an integral part of our day that we forget

why we punch it. Responsibilities rear their heads and we scramble to do the things that appear to need our immediate attention, all the while ignoring the things that really do.

As a young parent, it seems that all I can remember doing is making I living. I know I spent time with my daughters, but I'm not sure it was really good time. I hope it was. I think it's how life goes, though it's kind of unfortunate, that we spend so much of our early lives scrambling to

make a living instead of scrambling after a racquet ball, working at the office instead of working on a tee-ball swing, trying to make more money or just make ends meet instead of trying to make a macaroni necklace. I'm reminded of a poem someone gave me when my kids were little. "Cooking and cleaning can wait till tomorrow, cause babies grow up as we've learned to our sorrow. So quiet down cobwebs, dust go to sleep, I'm rocking my baby and

babies don't keep."

So we'll get back to the court as soon as we can, spend another hour whacking the little ball around, hoping not to injure ourselves or each other but loving every minute of it either way. I hope we get a better ball next time (this one bounced really strange, causing some of those misses) and better racquets (both had holes in them) and we might play on another court with straighter walls.

By the way, in case you're wondering, I won.