On Tennis Balls

Life so far has afforded me dozens, perhaps hundreds of sublime moments. Utterly unbidden, unquestionably undeserved - true gifts. At least half those moments, I tell you, are identical: I am standing bare-legged on green concrete under sun or night lights, three years old or forty, opening a can of tennis balls.

Pop. Hiss. Peel.

The perfect three-note symphony, chased by a rubber-sweet scent. How often I forget, life is like that sometimes.

Once the fourteen pounds per square inch of pressure are released from the can there is no going back. The balls are born into the world and subject to its vagaries: the squeeze of a sweaty hand, the toss into empty space, the terrific gravitational fall, the swinging assault of catgut strings, the choke hold of a diamond hole in a chain link fence, the abandonment in the thick grass where no one bothers to glance, the rain, the heat, the humidity, the wind – the god damn wind! - the brutal and incessant bouncing against the hardcourt ground, and – finally – a retirement stuck in a stubborn puppy’s mouth, the dye in the yellow felt fading, coated in grit and spit, eventually punctured or torn open, thrown into a box that itself gets tossed into the trash.

Mine is a tennis-loving tribe. My father’s parents both played and taught my father. My mother, gone now, learned as a girl and played competitively as an adult. My sister and I both played, poorly until we played well. My mother’s father, Bernie, though, he topped us all: He earned a varsity letter in tennis – and football, and basketball – at the University of Minnesota in 1942.

Never having met the man, he survives on the shelf of my imagination next to the long-gone Star Wars and GI Joe figurines I collected as a kid - tall, strong, handsome, uniformed and ready, capable of whatever shape of greatness is called for. At the same time, I think, somehow, maybe, he is also my template for God – a man, beloved but blurry, distant and familiar, a myth that existed once and might still, but only if you know how to close your eyes and listen.

I will close my eyes, occasionally, and conjure Bernie. I will watch him – 6’2”, 205 – holding a football or a basketball in his giant hands, ducking and dodging the enemy, winning at everything, beaming beatific light, and calling out to his four daughters in a voice they would all still swear they can hear. Then, I will see him looping a thick forefinger through the aluminum top of a tall canister containing a holy trinity of balls (A.G. Spalding and Bros. in his day) and following the timeless instructions there inscribed: Lift ring up. Pull top off.

Pop, hiss, peel, and he’s asking me in a ghostly whisper if I want to hit.

I do. I always want to hit.

For several especially tennis-heavy years in my youth, when my sister, mom and I all played competitively and our Springer Spaniel Barney’s appetite for playing fetch was at its peak, my father would present us with a box of twenty-four cans of Wilson Championship tennis balls on Christmas morning. “That, there” he would say – the proud provider, pointing, pausing for effect – “is a one-year supply.”

At that age, because time was still a bit bendy, because I believed in limitless progress, because I had yet to sustain the stings of impermanence, I would have told you that those balls would last forever.

Alas, they did not.

I would visit, now and again, the closet in the dark dank basement where the balls were kept. In the cold months, I would admire the full rows – can after can, pressurized with the possibility of immeasurably high bounces, awaiting their turn on the court. After the temperature turned, though, and the snow slid off the high roof of the house and the taut nets appeared on the high school courts up the road, gaps began to appear in the rows. By midsummer whole rows were gone, and from there, well, you know how these things go.

Until now, today, writing this, I’d never felt sad about those gaps, those absences. It was just the way of things. Another box of balls was always coming, after all. But now, in middle age, I know all about those stings of impermanence. They are occurring with such frightening frequency, in fact, that I am beginning to believe that I, too, will be one day be a gap in the box in the basement.

After a decades-long hiatus, I started playing tennis again during the pandemic, on the same indoor courts where my mother played a long time ago. Mostly I lose. I’d like to say that’s because my opponents are all half my age – recent college champs – or because they cheat, but I’d be lying. Some are young. Some are my numerical peer. And some are older. And fitter. And less poor-tempered than I am. No one cheats.

And so: Most Monday nights after my match, Karen, my wife, can be found cradling my ego like it’s an infant with a boo-boo, and asking me why I keep putting myself through it.

Would you believe me if I told you it’s for that bare-legged moment with the can? The moment before the pop and the hiss and the peel? The moment when everything promised is still possible – the full bounce of the ball, every angle of the racquet, old familiar voices that transcend the remembering mind and time, the bottomless boxes of balls beneath a magic tree?­­­