Do Over
Posted on January 31, 2008
Filed Under Anxiety, Blogroll, bitching and moaning, snark, suburban joys | 9 Comments
Some days are the kind of days you’d just like to hit the “Do Over” button. Roll back the clock and let it all unwind again.
But as it is, it’s the only day you’ve got and starts with an early morning wake-up (okay, it’s more like an early morning decision to finally get out of bed because you’ve been awake since three a.m.). It’s six thirty and the coffee pot doing its magic thing and has started to brew coffee without supervision (the only positive thing that will occur all day). You plod down stairs in a bathrobe to discover rain and clouds and melting snow that reveals all the dog shit that has been accumulating in the back yard since early December. Each little pile of doggie do-do glowing pink in the sunrise. You make a mental note to not walk through the grass of the back lawn until April. Best to give all that manure time to just sort of melt away.
You send the children off to school with all the appropriate backpacks and binders and healthy snacks and lunch money and mismatched gloves. You settle in to write a bit before having to be on the tennis court for a crucial match on which your team ranking hinges. A loss today and your team slips to number three in the league. A full court sweep and you’re at number one.
The writing goes poorly. You are preoccupied, fairly vibrating with the cursory performance anxiety that always accompanies an away match. You spend forty minutes convincing yourself that it’s okay to be writing absolute drivel because it’s all about the process and finding the flow and there is a little yellow sticky note in the upper right hand corner of your monitor reminding you that “No One Gives a Shit”. (You learned yesterday that, according to Dennis Lehane, who must know something because he wrote Mystic River, this reminder is supposed to be freeing but today it feels like a taunt).
Your tennis partner roars into the drive in her hulking SUV and you climb in for a white knuckle ride, gripping the arm rest as she weaves through morning traffic at 80 MPH while answering her cell phone and looking for the driving instructions that she swears she’s put some place handy, like in her racket cover, which must be in the way, way back seat. Taking a significant gamble that she will keep the vehicle on the road while you root around in the cargo hold, you unbelt, climb into the cavernous way-back of the monstrous SUV. You come up with the racket but no driving directions. So it’s off at the next exit. U-turns are made and now your tennis partner is driving faster than is sane on back roads populated by children walking to school and joggers and chipmunks. You make it back home without killing anyone or anything and find the driving directions on the kitchen counter right next to the phone. With directions in hand, it’s 95 MPH back down 495 South, the beginning of your trip to tennis hell.
You’d think, having beaten the very same team last week, you’d feel confident and steady, ready to rip cross court winners and
chuck up the occasional top-spin lob. But you are now slightly car sick, residually green from the velocity of your journey. And you can see that your tennis partner is off too a shaky start as well. As the erratic warm-up proceeds, she whispers that she was out far too late the night before and probably shouldn’t have had that extra glass of wine. “How many glasses were there,” you ask. “Only four or five. I think. At some point I stopped counting,” she says with a shrug of the shoulders.
Before the first service game is over, you know you’ll lose. You consider the option of telling your partner to go grab a water, take a trip to the bathroom, run a lap around the track, pick through skirt samples in the pro shop and let you play this one solo. But it’s against league rules to play Canadian style and so you endure another hour and a half of bad tennis before you climb back into the SUV and crouch down for the ride home. You whimper and grimace and cover your eyes. You are afraid of her driving but mostly you are trying to stifle the urge to throttle your tennis partner who has just largely contributed to a very embarrassing loss. Safely back in your own mudroom, untying your tennis shoes and tossing your coat on the floor, you watch your tennis partner spin the behemoth around and peel out just a little bit on that shit-strewn lawn. If only she could apply a little of that assertiveness to her tennis, you think and settle in to a long afternoon of shameful sulking and disappointment.
You can’t possibly write anything meaningful or good today so you’ll apologize for the bellyaching. You know you’ve got your health and a roof over your head and all the attendant luxuries. But, today, you ain’t got game and losing is a bitch.
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