First, Gart began by asking me why there weren’t going to be open courts available during certain times today. “Now that we’ve got 12 courts (up from 8), we should always have some open courts available!”  Ralph chimed in with something equally inane and the two monologues went on unchecked for a few minutes, me not able to get a word in edgewise.

Finally I stopped them and told them the truth as it exists in my world-view. The truth doesn’t matter to this story but is as follows:  it can get complicated but we have designated times for open play and during our busy periods at least four courts allocated to that, four reserved courts set aside for those who want to reserve them, and during periods where we are doing both reservations and open play we restrict the round-robins (organized play based on skill level) to no more than four courts. Thus, worst-case scenario, we would have four courts available to virtually any purpose known to man, excepting of course those who may wish to land small planes in liu of flying them into IRS buildings or some such. This can occasionally be superseded by club-sanctioned events, e.g. that very day (to Gart’s question) when we had Sarah’s annual Woman’s Mixed-Level Social scheduled (using eight courts), leaving us only four for the Men’s C Round-Robin and, for two hours, none for open or reserved play, and I was explaining all abut THAT when Ralph leaned over to Gart and asked “Are you getting any kind of an answer out of all this BS?”.

This, of course, torqued me mightily. Here I had actually given credence, if just for a moment, to the idea that they might actually WANT an answer and all they were doing was baiting me…again…and worst of all I bit. I should know better, but my intemperate response was that I was no longer talking to Ralph and was only talking to Gart, and that any further communication from Ralph to me would need to be routed through Gart, and we went on that way for a few minutes, much to their amusement and my continued irritation, until my butt hurt too much to continue and I got up and gimped off.

I don’t know why I waste my time on those two.

That said, pickleball appears for me to be an even longer journey. When we arrived at St. George, Utah a few days ago for the warm-up week before the pickleball tournament within the Huntsman World Senior Games (aka Senior Olympics) I was totally jazzed and looking forward to showing everybody how good I’d become since last year, which you know right away was a major no-no. It wasn’t so much that “they” showed me different but more that my anxiety to show somebody something made my doing virtually anything correctly somewhere between difficult and impossible. It was only after we (Irene and I) had lost our first four or six games that I settled down and began to hit one shot at a time…at which point my game slowly re-appeared from wherever it had been off hiding.

This was all very disheartening until I was, today, playing against and later watching a few of the “big boys”, no names mentioned, who had come in from various parts of the country and arrived at the courts for their first outing of the season today. I was now playing adequately, as was partner Steve, and although we got beat fairly handily by the big boys it wasn’t as handy as it had been last year, and by golly they were missing a few shots that they would most always have made, simple down-the-line forhands for instance, or hitting lobs into the net, or serving long, or dinking shots six feet on the wrong side of the in-line, or whatever…just like Steve and I. And they were obviously pissed about it, too…just like we have been. But, over the course of watching them play for about two hours, they very quickly were regaining form and were suddently were hitting the shots they had missed just those few minutes before, and looking, once again, like the top-flight players they are.

What’s the point? I could make many points out of this simplistic set of observations but what this certainly has to bring home is that pickleball is not a 50-year sport for me, while it may be a 20-year sport for some of the so-called big-boys, and that, for me, I will have to simply give myself some time, each year, to get back into the game…head and body, assuming I’m allowed to keep playing for awhile. But all that said, I am a better player than I was at this time last year. And, even when I don’t show it, I know it’s in there and can be re-discovered, while last year it wasn’t yet there at all. And, God willing, there may be other improvements still available to me, and perhaps I will discover them….one step at a time, one step at a time, one step at a time.

Yes, I know what she means, hard to miss her meaning accompanied as it were by hand-gestures signifying, if not mountains, then at least large mounds. But seeing big steaming piles of moose evidence is not the same as seeing a moose. When I was last in Alaska I had been out running (outside of Anchorage if I remember correctly) and was on a dirt road pretty far outside the city limits, doing a run of maybe ten miles. I was more or less at the end of the run as dictated by my stop watch and was thinking about turning. I decided “just a bit further”, went up and over a rise, and came within five feet of running broadside into a cow moose, thankfully without calf (or otherwise I might not be here talking about the story), and she simply looked at me disdainfully, put her nose back into the underbrush and continued filling her belly. I back-pedaled as fast as I could, reversing nearly in mid-stride as I did so, perhaps looking more like Michael Jackson doing a moon-walk than the middle-aged jogger I was, and beat my time out by ten minutes getting back.

Wisconsin, our current stop, doesn’t have the same claim to fame as the town in Michigan (in fact we’re told you’d need to go to Canada from here to see a moose) but it, too, has its attractions. For instance, Woodruff, the place right around the bend from the Hiawatha RV Park where we are staying, claims to have the World’s Biggest Penny. This was a strange enough fame-claim to inspire Irene and I to go looking for it. Turns out it is simply a painting of a big penny, although all the banners in town proclaim “world’s largest penny” and why they think that seeing a PAINTING of a big penny is the same as seeing a big ‘ol COPPER penny is beyond me, any more than I understood, in Michigan, how seeing the evidence of a moose can be considered the same as a moose or how you can have the U.S. Moose Capital without having a visible moose.  Heck, I don’t know…I just go where we are pointed half the time, looking for something to write home to mother about, or in the advent of her not being available, I gladly settle for you, especially in that your expectations are so low, knowing us as you do.

That may be all the word on Wisconsin I have to share at the moment. We have not fished here at all, alth0ugh the small-mouth bass water nearby looks invitingly rocky albeit a bit low. Also we have NOT eaten a Pastie (Pass-tee), the famous meat pot pie. We have not eaten any fried cheese curds, nor have we attended any of the many Friday all-you-can-eat fish fries sponsored by everyone from Elk’s Lodges to boy scout trouts, generally, it seems, followed by blackout bingo. St. Germaine, down the street from us about ten miles, also has a Monday flea market of some size and fame, which we missed coming in, and a very large farmer’s market on Wednesdays, which interests us Local-vores quite a bit although we will miss that as well on the flip-side as we drivers say, leaving at oh-dark-thirty tomorrow morning as we are to visit good friends Tom and Jean in Minnesota, where I intend to beat Tom’s butt in pickleball….once again, and this time with the expectation he will bawl like the baby he is.

In the meantime, I need to get us ready, so I’d better get on it. I have a drawer face that’s pulled off, a toilet seat that’s loose, a sewer tank that needs to be flushed, etc. etc. It’s hard to roll when pieces are falling off here and there, personally and otherwise, but a screwdriver can take care of the coach. Actually, overall it’s tough out here but it’d be tougher anywhere else in these perilous times and we are making the best of it. No sense your feeling sorry for us, if you were.

Before I go there, however, let me wander off into a quick reminisce about this past Fourth of July weekend, which Irene and I spent in the company of friends on their spectacularly groomed 15-acre farm outside the rapidly-growing and decidedly (albeit rural-y) upscale Atlanta bedroom suburb of Canton, GA. Our friends Ann and Tom are each retired from exacting professional disciplines themselves; Ann was a touring concert pianist under management to Columbia, Tom a senior veterinary surgeon and professor. And today, while they are retired, it’s hard to imagine them being less retiring…Ann, who seems to have almost inexhaustible energy still, is a strong contender for the Martha Stewart award, given every year to the Southern hostess with the most-ess….but who also conducts music appreciation classes in her home, organizes book clubs, does friends-of-everything benefits, grows most of the food they eat and prepares it all in beautiful and unusual ways and even plays decent pickleball in her spare time. Tom, in turn, owns (and by this I mean he does) all the outside work around the farm, hiring only a few people to assist him, and in the meantime they both are prosletizing pickleball among the community and, on the two days we played with them, 12 and 8 other pickleball players showed up, on the busier day giving us three-courts-full of the four courts possible to play on their property…an excellent local turnout and an example of their generosity of spirit, time and place.

Why do I mention Ann and Tom and how does it related to Mitch and Raoul and this question of balance? Well, Mitch’s comments to me recently have been around how grateful he is that he again HAS a job, even though he is clear this will be his last job before he retires. He talks about how humbling the last ten months’ search for employment has been for him, even though he considers himself in some ways a humble guy to begin with…something I agree with, by the way; he is humble, in the good sense, and not because he would need to be, either. And Raoul? Raoul, straight up, is a workaholic, and when he lost HIS job six months ago, before long he was busier than ever as a computer and networking consultant and as a programmer, writing and implementing the programs he would recommend as necessary to his clients, a nice one-two punch of capabilities. Where Mitch is grateful for the new job and humbled by how hard even HE had to work to get it, Raoul is busier than ever and doesn’t have time to think about whether or not he is humble at all.

Melding in Tom and Ann’s experiences, both when working and after they quit, and you see that, in this small sample of four folks, these high-achieving people all work hard and they often continue to work hard whether or not they are gainfully employed per se (meaning, whether or not they get paid money to work), and they all get some satisfaction from contributing and some sense of self from the work itself, but they realize, usually down the line, that less is more relative to employment. Tom and Ann are there, Mitch is nearly there, and, although Raoul is NOT there (”there” being conscious of less work being more), he IS asking questions about balance that surely EYE never asked when I was his age, being…wait for it….too busy working to think of balance.

For me, I have a persistent thought (or is it a hope?) that my own work-life isn’t yet through, that there is one more page to be turned in in my work-book. But, unfortunately (or fortunately, I don’t know), I can’t read what’s on that page yet. As I mentioned recently a number of things that could become work still appeal to me…antiquarian book dealership, antiques in general, collecting (meaning buying and selling) artifacts about poker and gambling and fly-fishing, playing professional poker, writing at some level, selling my own book(s) and that of my brilliant brother the Judge….oh, and more, I’m sure.

And then there is the question of balance in my own life. When I STOPPED working…finally…in 2006, it took a good while for my psyche to understand that I was no longer working but that I had not disappeared because of it. And, truth be known, I’m still not entirely comfortable with my new identify, whatever it is, except that it seems to be more about me and less about what I used to do, in so far as I now know who “me” is, at least. And then there’s the whole question about who writes about you…and about Mitch, and Raoul, and Tom, and Ann, if it isn’t me, and if I’m off working, how do I do that, assuming it really does need to be done? Which of course makes one wonder if you can do both and make a living out of writing something…which I have certainly tried to do in the past, although I failed miserably at it…but haven’t the times and publishing opportunities changed now, and does that create new opportunities for Moi? Or not? Should I follow it up? Or just think about it all a whole bunch more? Eventually, the problem will resolve itself, but given typical life expectancy that could be awhile yet…..

What to do, what to do……

I get that frog, and I suppose I get the limitations to the approach as well. When I feel good about myself I can describe me as a Renaissance Man, interested in almost everything. When I’m feeling judgmental I recognize the same reality differently; to be interested in so many things is to focus on nothing and (while limiting risk around putting oneself out there) certainly assures you will never be acclaimed as number one at anything, either, thus insuring that no waves of adulation will ever lap at my feet. Too bad, so sad…..

….and yet this character strength or flaw does allow me to experience other lives, sometimes one after another, if only in my still-fertile imagination and if only for a few moments. Take today, for example….

Irene and I started the morning exactly where we have been for awhile, on the outskirts of Auburn, AL., a small still-redneck not-quite-cosmopolitan University town about an hour out of Montgomery, if that helps you geographically. Jake, now recovering a bit more regularly from his cancer surgery of this past Tuesday, actually walked with us all the way to the trash receptical and almost all the way back, a distance of half a mile, easily the best he’s done by two times and prompting us to believe we could leave him alone for an hour and get a bike ride in before the humidity came to join the already-evident heat. Changing into our bicycle touring gear, putting on the orange breathable top, the dark gray pickleball short, the cool lighter-gray short-fingered gloves, the charcoal hard helmet, I became like Lance Armstrong, of course too old, too heavy, riding a hybrid bike that Lance wouldn’t laugh at, him being seemingly way too polite a guy, but surely would snicker at behind a metaphorical hand, but I was he for just a moment, and straining to cross the semi-busy rural highway and rocketing up and down over the train crossing just past it. Just for a moment, but I got it. The ride, no more than ten miles and maybe an hour, was done with no stops to celebrate my Lance-ness…the first longish ride we’ve taken non-stop, as it were. VERY cool, good to be him.

Fifteen minutes later Irene and I were bound for the Jule collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University, a pretentious title for a fine modern building housing a few terrific permanent collections. One of them, Dale Kennington’s Shifting Mythologies exhibit, consisted in part of five richly painted multi-panel screens and brought me so far into the art that I thought I could never escape. All of her perspectives are uniquely arranged to draw her viewers in, take for instance the panels depicting a beautiful pre-pubescent girl, standing and struggling through some obvious anguish, glancing at us as if to recognize that we weren’t going to save her, but could, if we only wanted to. And in THAT moment, I wanted to, wanted to have the skills of Dale Kennington, knew I never would, but, oh, my….I got it, and her, right then, if just for that second.

Around the corner, same gallery…and there is a permanent exhibit of…would you believe it?…pop-art Icon Andy Warhol, arranged to show first the polaroid snaps he took of subjects and then the paintings themselves, so heavily stylized and yet so true to the photos, showing another exposure, another side of the same thing that didn’t exist until he put brush to canvas, and what genius, and, after we talked about it a bit, I think both Renee-girl and I got it, and him,  although I could feel myself losing it as I turned the corner and left him behind.

The rest of the day has gone like that. At lunch in the wonderful Amsterdam Cafe (”wonderful” and “cafe” are two words that only juxtapose in Auburn at that particular place, home of, among other things, a lump-crab-meat-and-avocado-on-croissant sandwich that ranks as “one of the hundred things you have to eat in Alabama” for very good reason.), I talked over with Irene this book I’ve been reading, a great little first-edition of Big Deal: A Year as a Professional Poker Player, by Anthony “English Tony” Holden, in which, ala George Plimpton, Tony takes on another life, a life EYE have often dreamed about, playing in, among other places, the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. VERY, VERY cool…a life that I still want, but believe that, now, I may never see it unless something changes. That something may be in me or just in my finances but I’m putting it out there now….just give me a year, and let me show just a small profit, and I’m a happy man. The book is written well enough for me to know that I don’t want to be Tony, not all the way through…I just want to do what he did, and still dream about it.

I wasn’t through yet, though. When we left, we stopped by, next door again, into a vintage clothing shop, and as I look to my left into the mirror here in our coach, I see a short-haired aging geezer-jock, not quite over the last hill yet, wearing a true vintage tie-died tee-shirt, orange and red mostly, with the most bitchin’ picture of Mickey Mouse falling down on the front. Who IS that cool dude, I ask out loud, just playing, knowing, of course, that it’s another version of me, a version that may continue to please, who knows? And, really, who cares? Consistency can be badly over-rated, don’t you think? Vrooom, vroom!

In fact, I’m sitting pretty today, typing away in an amazingly tasteful and even more comfortable customer lounge, (and, hey, you wanna look? Check it ooouuutttt….), Irene and I just waiting (and OH how we love waiting!) for six things to simultaneously get done on our Allegro Bus. Outside in the almost-spotless shop, Brannon and his consistently hard-working family – his brother, father, father-in-law and his wife – stay hard at it, replacing my 2,000 Watt inverter with a 3,000 Watt version, adding two more house batteries, and getting ready to install our Kenmore residential refrigerator, which will roughly double both our refrigerator and freezer capacities while simultaneously working, which the Norcold refrigerator standard to most motor homes hasn’t done very well. In fact, I could tell you stories about the Norcold but won’t, at least today – all I can say is that Irene is liable to be so happy having a reliable, working, decent-sized refrigerator instead of, as she so succinctly says, “that friggin’ Norcold” – that it could bode very well for me if you know what I mean, nudge-nudge, wink-wink.

But it’s all taking some doing, and don’t tell me ‘cuz I’ll tell you, nothing fits easily when you are doing a retrofit. For instance, the six batteries will be increased to eight, but there is no good other place to install the extra two batteries, so they are customizing two battery slide-outs and will install six batteries on the bottom on one and have the other two batteries on the top. The space they have to work with is exactly the size it needs to be…to about the sixteenth of an inch. If they get it working correctly, and right now it looks like they may, it will be a feat of custom engineering that will alone be worth the price of admission, not that I’m telling Brannon that until this is all done, of course.

Nor is the refrigerator install the end of the story, even given all it entails. By the end of tonight, per Brannon, not only will the refrigerator be installed (and the supporting batteries and inverter), but a residential-style fan will be in the bedroom,

Brannon and friend install fan

the old-school night drapes will be gone from the coach’s front and the new-school drop-down day/night shades will be in place, and Brannon’s peer Chris will have also showed up after having worked three other jobs to install our flat-screen TV in the bedroom. There are other things….trouble-shooting a water-pump light that shows a continuous “on” condition and putting a new power plug into a wall to facilitate the subwoofer’s new home, a change in placement necessitated by the previous replacement of the cabinets by the dining table, done yesterday by the famous Tim (who has yet MORE cabinet work to do, but that’s Friday…what day is this, anyway?).

They work hard and they apparently don’t stop and I recently learned they don’t sleep. Brannon has estimated we will be finished up by 11:00 PM this evening. But he and his brother won’t be finished. A bit ago he received an emergency phone call from the famous Bob Tiffin, who owns Tiffin Motor Home Company. Bob has a highly irate customer in a new Zephyr…the top-end Tiffin coach….without air-conditioning for three days now. In Raleigh, NC. Five hours away at least.  In 90+ heat and supercharged humidity. And, when Brannon and his brother are finished here, they will, without sleep, drive five hours to Raleigh and help out the guys there. Because, you see, Brannon is still working for Tiffin, and until July that’s the way he’ll roll.

If, when I talked previously about my observing a somewhat lackadaisical work ethic in some of the Tiffin employees over the month we’ve been here, I bet you thought I meant EVERYBODY who works back here, didn’t you? Let me say right here, right now, I didn’t. I didn’t mean everybody. I didn’t, at least, mean Brannon and his gang. Or Tim or Chris. I can’t speak for everybody, but I can speak for them. These guys, at least, rock big.

AJ serving, Steve admiring...at the Utah Huntsman Senior Games

Pickleball has been around for more than 30 years, but most people, when asked if they’ve heard about it, look at you like you’re pulling their leg or worse. That may change; pickleball is said to be one of the fastest-growing sports in America and is most probably THE fastest-growing game among geezer-jocks, those of us over age 50 who still picture ourselves as athletes.

But what is it? It’s a court game…a game played on a court almost exactly the size of a badminton court, one-fourth the size of a regulation tennis court. And it looks a bit like a miniature version of tennis. The court itself is striped similarly to tennis with a couple of small exceptions. Usually played as a doubles game, players face each other across a net strung just a couple of inches lower than a regulation tennis net. Equipment consists of paddles and a “whiffle”-type plastic ball. Paddles are constructed of different materials but the typical paddle is constructed of a composite with a waffle-type core that may have a graphite skin.

Serves are done, as in tennis, to the opposing diagonal court. Serves must be made underhand. The receiving team must let the first ball bounce once. And, when they return the ball, the serving team must, in turn, let the ball bounce once as well. After that, “game’s on!”, and volleys, kills, short and soft shots, strategies and so forth are all the order of the day. I’ve played some serious racquetball and squash and it’s a more strategic game than either. I’ve played some fun tennis and, if you aren’t a tennis “A” player, pickleball is a better, faster workout. Like any game it has its limitations, but for geezer-jocks like Irene and I it’s the cat’s meow.

It’s also a fanatic’s game. A year after having introduced ourselves to the game, we are playing in Senior Olympic tournaments in three states, we are the upcoming Club President(s) at Palm Creek Golf and RV Resort in Casa Grande, AZ., a growing pickleball hotbed, and, as we travel the U.S. during the summer, we are consistently on the usapa.org site looking for places to play. Sounds like addiction to me, but in a good way!

Wanna know more? Check out the USA Pickleball Association site at http://www.usapa.org.