Returning to Tennis

Over the holidays, I visited my hometown of Oberlin, Ohio. My parents, who've both entered their 80s, still live in the house they bought two years before I was born. Doing the math any way you want to, that means they've been in the house for 52 years.

The house is loaded with 52 years' worth of stuff. To be fair, my parents have begun reducing the contents with a plan of moving into smaller and stair-free living quarters eventually. And, to be fair again, it's not all their stuff. I'm the middle child of three, and (so I say) because I lived overseas a lot until Markus and I settled in Michigan and had kids, I always had two pretty good excuses for not taking charge of the stuff I'd left in Oberlin. One: I was overseas and couldn't take much with me. Two: I had little kids and couldn't bother with old boxes in the attics and drawers jammed with letters and photos.

Well, I'm back to living overseas, but I have at last begun dealing with the items in my parents' house that still have my name on them. Every time I visit, I find a day or more to sort and toss. There's my childhood and youth. My summer in Japan. There are my college years (at Wesleyan and at Oberlin) and study/travel/living in Germany. There are the grad school years in Wisconsin and Oregon. I'm pleased to say that beginning in 1992, when Markus and I got married, I became the keeper of my own accumations of stuff. Markus evacuated his parents' apartment years ago at their insistence because they need the space. If only my parents didn't have such generous and ignorable attic space and such pronounced accumulation habits of their own.

I find junk and memories. Little glass ornaments I loved to touch when I was a child.

A box of items from my girlhood desk and whatnot shelf revealed sealing wax and
a tiny punch bowl with ladle and cups in spun glass. (Attic sorting c. August 2012)

I find objects I clearly remember and objects I dimly remember. Objects I would never have known I could remember until I beheld them again. The summer of 2012, from a box labeled "What nots" I posed this little group, telling myself that a photo would make them last and I could part with them now. Then it was time to leave for the airport. I couldn't pack them away and I couldn't take them along. What did I tell my mother--to get rid of them? Or to pack them away for me again because I couldn't stand parting from them afterall?

Special collection. Objects I looked at and loved and played with as a girl.
On attic display. (c. August 2012)

This small collection may (or may not) be up in the attic still. I've cut my overall quantity down to about eight boxes up there, filled with the items you can't sort through quickly. Letters. Photos. Heavy things you can't easily mail to Germany. I'm a writer (my ultimate excuse for anything these days), and there might be a story in there. My daughter tells me it's a book: the Cleaning Out My Parents' Attic book. What stories are lurking in my girlhood letters? In the stacks of letters from old beaux and the stack from my husband? Look, there's my album of black and white Poloroid photos, and there in the photos you can see our cat (Serena)! I flip the cards with the plastic sleeved photos. I connect with the action performed dozens of times by a former me. I remember holding the corner of the photo, smelling the chemicals before peeling off the sheet that coated the photo, following the second hand around the face of my watch.

Early this month, I consolidated photos and letters into boxes I will return to--I promise. With a cup of tea and a real place to sit and sort, down from the attic, I can bring them into some kind of order. Of course I never miss or think about the lettes I wrote to my friend Sally (and she to me--for it is those I have collected) when we were eight or nine, but what kind of character can you create from old letters? From touching old objects of sentimental longing and familiarity?

And what, an alert reader might be wondering, does this all have to do with tennis?

One of the photos that crossed my hands and eyes was a black and white 8x10 of my high school tennis team. We stood and crouched, about ten of us, with coach Fran Baumann. Simple white t-shirt tucked into a red wrap-style tennis skirt. Raquets held slantwise across our fronts. Group photo smiles.

I played doubles with Sarah Friebert. I'm about 5' 4". She's about 6'1". My dark hair poofs out frizzy-curly. Her dark hair is sleeked back on her head. We are an odd couple.

Sarah and I became doubles partners junior year, holding down the position of second doubles. Senior year, we advanced to first doubles. The Oberlin team did well in our conference (we had some strong singles players), but team success always seemed to occur despite my own meager accomplishments on court. When we won, it felt like Sarah won and I did my best not to mess things up too badly.

But I did play tennis. I went to practice. I tried to learn topspin. I tossed and tossed and hoped I'd throw a ball where I could actually hit a serve. I had a mean doublehanded backhand (like Chriss Everett), it's true. I was lucky occasionally on a volley, and my forehand was sometimes okay. I had solid quadriceps that bulged out above the knee from all that "ready positioning" and running short sprints. I had a solid right forearm.

This past week, I followed a whim and peeked in on the Heilbronn Open men's pro tennis indoor tournament. It's an annual January event, held in the industrial area between my town of Flein and the neighbor town of Talheim. I see the posters every year, and this year I learned you could watch for free during the qualifiers. I took a look. It was tennis. Thwack of the ball. Squeak of the shoes. Breath and sweat of the players.

The officiators were a new element for me. A dozen linesmen surrounded the court, each responsible for calling one particular spot where balls could go long or wide. Sometimes they errupted with such animal noises of "Long!" and "Fault!" that people in the stands rustled nervously and chuckled. There were eight ball kids scampering around to keep balls out of the way. There was the scorekeeper. Back when I played, we called our own games. If I didn't see it properly, I always called the ball in. What else can you do? The serving player called the score before each point. We were teenagers and probably said dumb stuff like, "Luv all!" I do remember this about playing: deuce situations that went on and on. Once we hit 30-30, we called it deuce. Then it was "Ad out" and you scrambled to get the point. "Deuce" again. Then "Ad in" after which we invariably lost the game or set or match point and went right back to "Deuce."

Yesterday I watched the doubles final between the Skupski brothers of Great Britain and a what-the-heck pair of a Polish man and Finn who'd just teamed up for this tournament. The systemmatic Brits had every reason to win, practiced moves and conspiratorial strategy whispers before each play. But the other two men made the most of what-the-heck and pulled off the title. I'd never seen pro doubles before, but it turns out they don't play the whole deuce game. They get to 40-40 and then the next point decides the winner of the game.

The doubles players seemed to strategize about what kind of serve would be hit, where the second player would stand (crouch) out of the way, and probably what sort of pattern they might run. A doubles point--with running to the net, crossing the court, spinning to grab a shot--reminds me more of pairs figure skating than of the base-line, long rally and power shots of men's singles tennis. I don't remember having strategic mini-conferences with Sarah between points. I think my personal strategy when I had the serve went about as far as this: hope I hit the ball over the net and inside the box. Backing up: hope I can toss the ball up to where I can hit it on my serve. Hope I don't have to re-toss too often. Hope it's someone else's turn to serve soon.

I sell myself a little short, but not much. Maybe the desire I got from watching the tournament will hold, to grab a raquet and swing at a ball. Maybe it will inspire me to check out the tennis club that's three blocks from my apartment.

But what I'm really thinking about today is how important threads in life get started and keep going. I suppose that's what nostalgia is. Sarah Friebert re-entered my life about ten years ago. She went on to become a pediatric oncologist, and I went on to have a child with cancer. She reached out to us mid-cancer journey and sent Simon one of the best goody boxes he ever got (how did she know he would like ring-pops so much?). In 2004, I learned that Sarah was not only a pediatric oncologist, but she had also specialized in pediatric palliative care. She's one of the pioneers of that field, and I most recently encountered her on the pages of a January 20, 2014 New Yorker article about advances in the field. Here's another link about the article from Akron Children's Hosptial, where Sarah works.

During the two months we spent caring for Simon through his dying, Sarah advised patiently on the phone from Ohio. About dosing narcotics. Whether to transfuse blood or not. To hydrate or not. How long a person can last without taking food or water. We found a way to blend her knowledge with the care plans of Simon's doctors in Utah. My doubles partner.

Watching tennis this past weekend and recalling the sort of tennis player I'd been, I wondered if the challenges and rhythms of Simon's cancer weren't a whole lot like tennis. You get a kind of clean slate when you start a new set in tennis, and you get that sometimes, too, with cancer. But you get into trouble again, then try to get out. You win some rounds, you lose others.

I do think I kept at it as a tennis player, but I had limits on my abilities. I know I kept at it on Simon's cancer care, doggedly keeping pace with treatment needs (and other stuff), but I wonder now, having known the terrible odds from the beginning, if I ever thought we could win that one, any more than I ever believed I'd win at tennis. Can that be true? It feels true.

I watched a player win the men's singles tournament yesterday. He was not one of the top-seeded players, and he'd come into the tournament ranked about 138 in the world. But he was on a tear, having won 12 of 14 matches already this month. Having lost in a semi-final in Doha to world number one Nadal (but having held his court against the champion). Peter Gojowzck (24-year-old German) beat the number one seed Igor Sijsling (Netherlands) in two sets. Gojo was calm at the baseline and hit a wicked-hard ball that looked for all the world like it was out, but then it dropped just on the "in" side of the line. Topspin! I thought. Isn't that what they taught me in the summer time at the Oberlin Tennis Camp all those years ago?

Aside from 15,300 Euros, the big deal about a win for Gojo in the Heilbronn tournament was a chance to move into the top 100 players. We'll be seeing more of this player, I'm quite sure. He was a pleasure to watch. He said his next goal is to make the top 50. Dreaming big, the top 10.

I checked today's stats, and there he is at 99. Every. Win. Counts.

Accomplishment: Infinite Jest

Congratulations to anyone who can attach meaning to the title Infinite Jest. Either you are aware of the David Foster Wallace novel, or perhaps you recall the line in Hamlet when Yorick (the king's jester, now a skull) is described as "… a fellow / of infinite jest". I learned of the latter in the process of digesting the former. The novel, Infinite Jest, takes a lot of digesting.

While I perused the English language books at my local German library over the summer, this one gleamed at me from the W shelf. As I mentioned in my July 15, 2012 post, I decided to pack the book home. It weighs 1.2 kilograms (2.6 pounds). I put it on a shelf for a good two months, eyeing it now and then and wondering if I dared take it on and if it would be something for me. 1,071 over-sized, densely worded pages, of which the last 88 pages contain 388 David Foster Wallace style footnotes: maddening, hilarious, enlightening--the kind of thing I had to redouble my determination to get through, especially the multi-page ones, but which almost always rewarded the effort. You find things like this: a lengthy filmography that cites a film production company called Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. (And what's the book called?) Repeated allusions to the new, slightly future-projected continental alliance O.N.A.N. (Organization of North American Nations). (This is a book about self-destructive pursuit of pleasure.) Or sub-footnote 110a: Don't ask. And 110b: Ibid. (Talk about getting jerked around.) That is a miniscule sample.

Obviously, I eventually got started on reading Infinite Jest. I had no idea what it was about, but I knew it was really the thing to read, if you're talking DFW. A kind of rite of passage in my literary journey. I had first read David Foster Wallace for an intro to literature course at the University of Utah in 2007. My instructor assigned Wallace's essay called "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (an amusing and unsettling travelogue about an ocean cruise written for Harper's).  I was smitten and read the whole eponymous collection of "Essays and Arguments."

It's hard to summarize IJ, but the story is set around 2009 as a future projection from the early 1990's when Wallace wrote it. There's a delightfully characterized tennis academy filled with boys and girls and administrators and instructors; a half-way house and its attendant drug addicts and recovering addicts and hilarious/heartening scenes from Alcoholics Anonymous; stunning and grungy views of Boston; secret agents attempting to intercept and prevent dissemination of a film "entertainment" that literally brings lethal pleasure to the viewer. Does that even offer a clue?

After about 200 pages, I decided to get the 1.2 kilo weight off my lap, and I bought my very first iBook to read on my iPad. The good news about the electronic format was less weight to hold and a built in night light for reading in the dark. I also loved being able to select a word and tap on "define" to get quick aid from a dictionary. DFW has a way of dropping a Latinate and/or medical/scientific word into an otherwise rambling and vernacular sentence. It's tempting to blow past the unknown word, but it can be fascinating to learn its meaning, which is usually astonishingly apt for the situation. Here's an example: "…he's wearing a bright-black country-western shirt with baroque curilcues of white Nodie-piping across the chest and shoulders, and a string tie, plus sharp-toed boots of some sort of weirdly imbricate reptile skin…" I tap-tapped on "imbricate" and discovered that it describes overlapping scales. See?

Suffice it to say that there numerous guide books and blogs and wikis devoted to unpacking Infinite Jest. My favorite so far is a blog called Definitive Jest, which often had explanations for obscure items that I could find nowhere else. I also appreciate the site's "wordle" style word clouds in the banner image. Another helpful reference on David Foster Wallace is a 2011 BBC radio documentary available for listening on uTube.

Back in Utah, David Foster Wallace came up again during a non-fiction writing workshop I took in the fall of 2008. We students had heard the news that morning of Wallace's death. He had hung himself at the age of 46. His insight into his depressed characters, quite a number of which are in IJ, seems to come from personal experience. Our professor had not yet heard the news, which we casually repeated for her. Her face went very still. "I know him," she said. "I used to work with him." A 2008 David Lipsky article in Rolling Stone takes a close look at Wallace's final years: The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace.

I loved reading Infinite Jest. It took me just under two months. When I finished it this past Sunday, I had the urge to start right back over again, partly because of the thousands of details I know I missed and partly because the book spits you out at the end, wanting more. On the other hand, I'm glad to be out of its grip and free to navigate somewhere new. To close this post, I want to share a few samples of the sensory descriptions I find so arresting in Wallace's writing. (Let me know if you're dying for a print page number citation. That's one thing my enotes on the sporadically paginated iBook don't reveal, but I could flip through the printed book until I find them…)

At sunrise, "…the east's Mountain of Rincon range was the faint sick pink of an unhealed burn."
"…like Nature, the sky, the stars, the cold-penny tang of the autumn air,…"
"…scalp-crackling gust of Phoenix heat…"
"The pond is perfectly round, its surface roughened to elephant skin by the wind,…"
"Heat began to shimmer, as well, off the lionhide floor of a desert."
"His heart sounded like a shoe in the Ennet House basement's dryer."
"…his…rosary of upper lip sweat"
"The A.M. light outside has gone from sunny yellow-white to now a kind of old-dime gray,…"
"…he wore [his hair] in thick dreadlocks that looked like a crown of wet cigars."

Amazing stuff.

Signs of Spring

Having recovered full use of my right arm, I'm back to typing and other activities as usual. Just under 4 weeks to get rid of the stiffness and shooting pains from my elbow down to my wrist. I have a new respect for the complicated mechanism that is my arm. As I recall it, the soreness I used to get from hitting a tennis ball was never this difficult to shake.

We're having another day of balmy temperatures--a real feeling of summer at 25 degrees Celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit). This evening we plan to head to one of our favorite "Besen." Here in the Heilbronn area, where there are so many vineyards, the vintners run temporary restaurants at different times of the year. The tradition developed to help winemakers sell off older wines to make room for the new ones and also to offer another source of income. At a Besen, you can expect to find a list of 10-20 wines and a menu of local specialties. When the weather's nice, you can sit outside. Last Saturday we spent an idyllic evening (joined by my sister, Julie, who was visiting) at Weingut Drauz (I like the place a lot better than their website, which is one of the more bizarre websites, complete with goofy music, that I've seen in a while). After wine with tasty food (I had Maultaschen--or Swabian Ravioli) we finished the evening with Hazelnut spirits (grappa/schnapps that's clear, not sweetened, and goes down with a punch of flavor).

The word "Besen" means broom, and you literally find the establishments that are currently open by looking for the brooms that hang outside or along the road, like balloons marking the site of a party. The idea being that they are sweeping out the old, I guess. Here's a link to a German wikipedia article on the topic: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straußwirtschaft (even if Deutsch isn't your language, you can enjoy the photos).

So, on another topic, I have watched with puzzlement and some horror how the locals go about caring for trees. Especially in February, there was a rash of pruning. Piles of boughs lined the roads next to what remained of the trees. One explanation, I learned, is that February 28th was the last day that tree pruning was permitted. After that, the habitat needs to be there for birds to nest.

Okay, but what explains the amputation-style pruning method? Below are two photos of rather mild examples. As you can see, the main branches have been hacked off at a certain point, leaving the trees to send out new, thinner branches there. I trust there's solid reasoning behind the practice, but I haven't figured it out yet. Here are some of the theories so far:

1) Wine growers trim back the grape vines to two main stalks before the growing season and the practice is carried over to trees (from my British friend Andrew).

2) They do thorough pruning because it's expensive to undertake and you don't want to have to do it again very soon (from my mother-in-law).

3) Restrictions about tree size and/or overhang on neighboring property require the practice (my best guess).

4) Someone went crazy with a chain saw (OK, more a description than a theory, from my sister).

In any case, in my opinion, it's hard to comprehend the practice as something that is driven by aesthetics. If anyone knows something on the subject, I'd be interested to hear from you!