O took the news stoically at first and tried to inspire his sister’s smile by making goofy faces and performing antics with the pizza crust in his hand. His efforts were in vain. She retired to her room to weep and process. The sounds of her sobbing called into question the whole damn thing for me, the selfishness of two parents parting. But O remained tear-free for hours. He has seen and heard this coming for miles. He has witnessed our fighting. We have addressed the fact of our conflict and the possibility of our separation as a solution with him. He has had time to cry about this already.

In hindsight, I wish we had handled the parting differently. While there was no way to make it easy, we could have been more thoughtful. In the effort to explain his leaving, their father mentioned the word “months” which instantly sounded like an eternity hanging there in the space between us. “Months” in the life of a child is something akin to forever. I so wish we had said, Dad is leaving for the week and will be back Saturday, no more – no less. This is the truth. They probably don’t need to know much more beyond the week to week since we don’t know much more ourselves.

In hindsight, we should have made certain his departure was during school hours. We should not have made them witness to our grief. But My Better Half was anxious to get the show on the road. Living here with the knowledge he’d be leaving eventually was wrecking its own havoc. And it must have been torture – this imminent departure from the people he loves all in the effort to find a way back to them – permanently. I think he wanted to begin the process of settling into a new purgatory while waiting for things to magically heal, while hoping for some sort of divine intervention on our family’s behalf. No one ever imagines slipping so far down their own life that happiness is suddenly out of reach. How could it have gotten so beyond us? So beyond me?

And what’s the old saying? When it rains it pours -pours down waste pipe overflow from the second floor bathroom through the light sockets in the first floor office, soaking the rug, flooding the basement on the night two parents decide to part ways. It was almost biblical, the timing of this plumbing failure. O and G and I, stood watching the deluge. And O, as if inspired by the waterworks, finally gave in to tears. He let the crying take him where no nine year old should think to go, My life is terrible, I want to die, everything is awful…my house, my parents, my lack of friends. G piggybacked on this profound depression and began to agree that her social life at school was sub-par, that her life at home was unacceptably sad without her parents being together and happy and living in the same house with working plumbing and shared bedrooms. She rejected the possibility of two homes in close proximity, equal visitation, Daddy-days and Mommy-days, she rejected this quaintly presented notion outright. She could see immediately that nothing this complicated could turn out so easy and sunny and sweet.

And so the three of us fell asleep in my giant bed, trying to find some comfort in the proximity, alien and empty, listening to freezing rain lash at the windows, a sound quite like loneliness.

I wish I didn’t feel the need to tell the kids that each and every Santa we come across can’t possible be the real deal. I wish I could just let them harbor this seasonal deception. Why do have to get all cynical, smacking my lips with disapproval. “Get a load of that one kids? Look at the black, greasy hair beneath the wig. Smell his Bourbon breath. Mark my words, the real Santa is far too busy this time of year to be drunk at noon on a weekday.” My O and G have learned to out the fakes. They play coy games with the Santa stand-ins, “If you’re the real Santa then YOU can tell ME what I want for Christmas.” There is a moment of uncomfortable chuckling followed by a hostile silence. O and G slowly slip down off of Santa’s lap. Photos seem entirely beside the point. You can practically hear the shop girls sheepishly dressed as elves thinking – HATERS.

This year I have even given up on outdoor lights. It just seems so beside the point. The front of our house cannot be seen from the street yet each year I feel compelled to string the white bulbs on the dwarf spruces by the front door and march out of the house each evening at dusk to plug the damn things in for the pleasure of the one neighbor with whom we share the drive and who hasn’t hung even a wreath four years running. Not this year. No way. You can’t make me like Christmas. I just won’t. Wake me when it’s over and we’ve safely avoided spending thousands of dollars we don’t have. Wake me when I no longer have a wheat allergy and I can actually partake of the Christmas cookie buffet. And not a moment before.

If I’m being honest, periodically, in the past five months, I have wanted nothing more than a long and peaceful slumber, some break from the tortured meanderings of my mind. Some way out of all this effort we must expend trying to repair and remain. The idea of real ‘forward’ exhausts me, requires sooo much hard work, soooo much conviction and I can’t seem to find the certainty that real ‘forward’ requires. And so, sometimes, I confuse permanent avoidance with the concept of progress. At least it’s a solution of sorts rather than the absence of one.

Of course, each time it flits through my mind, I am profoundly startled and ashamed by this desperate though fleeting thought. I’m a mother of two, an intelligent attractive woman who should just exude self-esteem and yet I must admit to having considered, momentarily, checking out. How profoundly selfish and sad and altogether beside the point. There are women the world over suffering the loss of their children, their spouse, struggling with illness, poverty, addiction, natural disasters, and here I am feeling like everything I have is too much and not enough. It doesn’t make any sense at all.

And while our couples’ therapy continues, My Better Half and I persist in occupying the therapeutic frame in just the same way we started – each of us sunk into our own end of the long leather couch, facing a man who is supposed to save us, a stranger to whom we direct our most naked and dangerous thoughts about the other. My Better Half and I occupy that space without making eye contact; side by side, separated by throw pillows and years of resentment.

We are two people repeating ourselves week after week, framing the same problems, circling the same cracks in the foundation, defending the space that is not ‘forward’ or ‘better’ but stubbornly remains the same. We have contentious car rides full of shouting and accusation on the way to this bi-monthly meeting. This is a time when we feel safe unsheathing our claws. We know we will soon be sitting on the long leather couch of our collective unhappiness, spending 50 minutes licking the wounds we just inflicted.

We have mopey, quiet car rides home, forty minute journeys back to the reality of our lives – lived together under the same roof and, somehow, worlds apart, where we skirt conversations of import, dodging emotional landmines, saying little, sharing nothing, waiting until we are back in the therapeutic frame some ten, sometimes twenty days later, where we can, again, be candid and direct.

I find it hard to gather a spark from anything these days. Even the positive election returns, the optimism I feel now that we’ll have new leadership in Washington, seems clouded and thin, not quite the exuberant dance of future forward that I was expecting.

I suppose I’ve been to busy saying goodbye to the good things that are October: afternoon soccer practices and Sunday football games, the dazzle of colored leaves, the singular blue of autumn skies, striking the tennis ball while dodging acorns and drifts of pine needles at the base line, jogging without gloves and a hat, standing at the bus stop in nothing but shorts and a sweat shirt and sunset after 6 p.m.

Darkness arrives at 4:30. Mornings are chill and bleak and require two cups of coffee. It is time to make Winter preparations, a fact underscored by the arrival of the plow-guy today. He spent a few minutes staking the borders of our driveway and talked with anticipation of the first snow fall. His mentioning early November storms of years’ past sounded slightly ludicrous on a day of fog and drizzle and 57 degree temperatures. But I don’t doubt his facts and feel, now, just a hair more anxious and intolerant of all the leaf drop in the yard.

And while its seasonally time to eat heavily, sleep deeply and breath slowly, I find myself unable to find a state of relaxation. I spend whole nights sweating the small stuff and the big stuff and all the stuff in between and when I finish making mental grocery lists and planning my future as a trial attorney, I turn to contemplating the purpose of human emotions.

Last night, while fluffing my pillow and popping muscle relaxers in hopes of finding temporary hibernation, I pondered the concept of jealousy and decided that while most of us learned from an early age that the inherent human emotional response of possessiveness and wanting, the peculiar rile and prickle of insecurity we know as jealousy should be stifled, I think, in fact that jealousy can serve as a necessary and effective means by which to communicate our core feelings of vulnerability and deep love.

I’m not suggesting that the type of jealousy aroused by the neighbor pulling into his three car garage in a brand new Lexus is healthy or productive, but rather, I’m talking about the kind of jealousy that makes a person feel demonstratively protective and vulnerable when it comes to their mate, a spouse or significant other.

While jealousy may be a feeling most associated with machismo – men throwing perceived competitors down the pub stairs for looking at their date wrong while shouting, Wadda you looking at, I believe there’s a certain quiet admission of jealousy that can actually bolster a relationship, leading to open discussions of commitment and need.

It takes a lot to admit one’s insecurity to an intimate partner. It’s an admission of fear, fear that “I’m not good enough, smart enough, attractive enough, funny enough to hold your attention and I fear abandonment.” Such an admission may make a person feel like a weenie. But an admission like this is also a signal that one of a pair fears the loss of the other, holds the spouse in such high esteem, and at such great value, that this loss is unfathomable and to be avoided at all costs, it can be interpreted as sweet and, at it’s simplest, can serve as much needed validation. I think that when a spouse fails to admit to jealousy they miss an opportunity to say, in no uncertain terms, I really, really don’t want to lose you to anyone at anytime. It’s so simple a possessiveness, so certain an admission of love.

I can’t help but wonder how many relationships have been ruined by outspoken and admitted jealousy versus those that could have been saved if a person had just copped to a little unseemly possessiveness and said, out loud, I value you enough to fear your going, I realize others must see the same qualities in you that I hold dear and might want them for themselves?

It is a scream in a quiet room, a berry stain on a white dress shirt. This house, that is the focal point of our historic district, stands as a sort of example, a warning to potential home buyers against buying beyond their means, against allowing idealism and romanticism to influence a real estate transaction, against stretching the family budget to accommodate the fixer-upper only to find yourself pushing a reel mower through the small patch of grass at the foot of the porch stairs, the one bit of maintenance you can still manage without paying a third party, the one thing that you can control while the rest of the property folds and begins to fall in upon itself.

And perhaps there is an element of empathy that sustains our interest in this house, as My Better Half and I feel a sort of kinship with the poor people obviously waging this hopeless war against time and money and wood rot. We have intimate experience with just such a battle as we struggle to prop up our own crumbling home. We are just thankful that OUR humiliation is safely set back from the street, sinking into its degradation behind the privacy screen of scrub maples and poison ivy. There is no public witness to the state of our neglect and only those we invite to experience our folly are privy to our leaking sink and faulty toilets and the bats roosting in the attic.

We can understand these strangers strapped to the weakening joists of their centuries old home, keenly, intimately, as we too watched one too many episodes of This Old House and convinced ourselves that it was possible. We can imagine the arguments sustained over how to spend the last dollars in the bank account, he insisting that he is up to the task of demolishing and rebuilding that listing front porch, she remembering the basement drainage project that ultimately involved hydraulic drill rentals, forty eight hours of rattle and roar and the choking drifts of fine concrete particulate floating up from the cellar to settle on upholstery and counter tops and, remarkably, on all food items in the refrigerator.

And we secretly consider adopting the very public surrender that seems to have earned this desperate couple some sense of connubial balance. As the weather warms and the swarms of black flies begin to dissipate, the residents of 12 Elm have pitched a large, accommodating tent on their small patch of grass just to the right of the porch stairs, assuming the attitude of squatters on their own front lawn while the whole monstrous mess behind them crumbles and disintegrates, unsalvageable at last.

Now that they have declared defeat, they are free to focus on manageable tasks like keeping the tent flaps closed to the clouds of mosquitoes moving through at dusk, repairing rips and rends with a needle and thread, stringing up a sort of clothes line between two tall pines they once considered removing and have now come to think of as just two more residents on this piece of property that has finally bested them.

Tonight was book group night and a flock of female friends descended here to discuss everything but the book I’d chosen for this month’s read which is an excellent book, a fucking masterpiece but decidedly not a beach read and therefore was neglected by most in the group who gave up on all near-serious literature back in early May. I loved, loved, loved Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and could have underlined and highlighted and swooned over every damn line in the book but chose to really hyper-focus on one important passage conveying the true and consuming conflagration of new love,

“…there she was again. I was miserable with relief, afraid I might laugh for no reason, afraid I might look at her too long, trying to remind myself she was a stranger, though she had been my dearest, most inward thought for weeks, and that I might startle her with some unaccountable familiarity. I had been to the barber and I was wearing a new shirt, since it seemed only prudent to suppose that my constant, passionate, and most unworthy prayers might be answered. And I made a little experiment with hair tonic…and I thought, What an utter and transparent fool I am…If I had the same experience earlier in life, I would have been much wiser, much more compassionate. I really didn’t understand what it was that made people who came to me so indifferent to good judgment, to common sense, or why they would say, ‘I know, I know’ when I urged a little reasonableness on them, why it meant ‘It doesn’t matter, I just don’t care.’ That’s what the saints and martyrs say. And I know now that it is passion that moves them to their prodigal renunciations.”

The fact that this soul-slaying description of one man’s utter devotion to a total stranger was written by a woman shouldn’t surprise me. But it doesn’t much matter who wrote the novel, man, woman or extraterrestrial I will be reading it over and over again in this lifetime just to occasionally connect with the single most significant passage of romantic literature that I’ve ever read. And each time, I’m sure, I’ll throw my head down on the pillows and inwardly wail, If only someone, once, just once, ever felt that I was “the only true friend they ever had on earth,” then all this other stuff, this preparing brown bag lunches and selecting foundation shrubs and changing the oil and remembering my mother’s birthday and weeding the front walk would all make sense, or better yet, will all just become the pleasant backdrop to the pleasing complexity of my own true love story.

Instead, I will wake tomorrow, slightly hung over and entirely irritated with my children who refuse to abide by the sleep-past-six-summer rules. The morning will be sad and stale and same. I will make myself rise to the smallness of my life, vowing to drink less, to run the dishwasher before going to bed at night, to write thank you notes and wash the dog and try to remember that life, true life, does not resemble a novel, even a novel perversely devoid of plot,a novel full of religious connotations far beyond my secular grasp, a novel of ‘life sucks, you finally fall in love and then you die’. Because real, non-literary life, though just as tragic, is no where near as succinct. There’s so much wandering and muddling through between here and there that doesn’t make for clever commentary or character development. And this is something I’m just getting used to.

The hushed quiet of the private therapy room, free of the canned sounds of reception, is breathless and cool. Though it is dark, it is not dreary and there is some comfort in the fact that there is a Kleenex box and asian art work and a bowl of hard candies, butterscotch or peppermint, sickly sweet confections in a bowl, an oral diversion meant to ease the complexity of discussions about “relationship hygene” and the purpose of sexual encounters “to engage feelings of vulnerability and aggression which we have come to think of as taboo emotions and regularly suppress such frailties in most non-sexual human interactions.”

One can tell that much thought has been given to the arrangement of furniture in these therapy spaces. My personal therapist likes to sit in a straight backed chair pulled up to her desk while inviting me to take the seat that is directly adjacent to that desk. She can swivel to face me and put her feet up on the file cabinet. There is a window behind her and the filtered light illuminates the wisps of her short hair, glowing gold in the darkness of the room. Her visage is cast in shadow, completing the effect of deliberate anonymity. She is faceless, haloed even, playing the angel of benevolence whose expression I cannot read for the corona that surrounds her.

And our marriage therapist has his own contrived arrangement. He prefers a deep arm chair that faces a wide leather couch. There are two other arm chairs beside this couch. To sit one of these chairs would be to face the wall rather than the professionally dressed man who has greeted us gently, quiet but stern, paternally ushering us through the door. So we both sink into opposite corners of the long couch. We prefer to meet his gaze than that of one another, having shared a chilly car ride, a week of reserved hostility and patient withholding.

I get the feeling that he is making note of our seat selection. That our choice to sit together on the couch, however far apart, my habit of holding the throw pillow in my lap, hugging it to my chest as if for protection, tells him something about us as a couple, about the state of the connubial union. I only wish I could see the note he’s made next to “seat selection” – hopeless, helpless, hopeful, fucked. He must play a little game with himself. Upon first meeting a troubled couple, he must try to predict the outcome ahead of time, tagging the duo with some sort of premature prediction. He is, perhaps, keeping score of his ability to predetermine a couple’s destiny based solely on the place they choose to sit when first entering the inner sanctum.

But I have to believe we are learning things beyond where to place our fannies. Conversely, I fear that the learning, the progress, is supposed to be more efficient in its development, neatly packaged within the 50 minute therapy window, reaching its weekly conclusion by the end of each billable hour, when, in fact, we’ve both just managed to open a vein and are in the midst of a full soulful bleed on the oriental carpet when our fifty minutes have elapsed.

Almost as if there is an audible chime, a programmed alarm bell, we are ejected into the harsh glare of day, into the parking lot of our lives without the benefit of soft sounds and cushioned chairs and hard candies. We bleed and ooze a collective flow of unhappiness upon the pavement. And all the way home we wish for the mediator, the third party to help us frame and present our individual view points in a more palatable and digestible manner. I have thought to ask him how much it would cost to take him home with us for the week where he might spend some real time dissecting our likenesses, our differences, where he might really get a feel for the state of the union and can say, after seven short days, hopeless, helpless, hopeful, fucked with some measure of authority. That would be easier somehow than this slow burn that is perhaps progress and perhaps not and only time and countless seating arrangements will tell.

It was nearly a week ago that we herded Julia into the cat carrier, suffering deep lacerations and puncture wounds, all in the interest of giving her a better life, simplifying our own existence and dramatically decreasing the pet hair accumulation beneath the piano and on the back of the arm chairs.

By all reports from her adoptive family she is adjusting well. She is lavished with attention and given wet food and allowed to send the nights sleeping on pillows, in the company of humans rather than relegated to the confines of our dark, cold attic. Julia’s life has improved dramatically. My life has been made a bit easier for one less obligation, one less beating heart to care for.

But then there’s Cato, our other cat, who preceded Julia in our home by eight years, who, by all observation did not care one bit for Julia and has hissed and growled his way through the past four years, barely enduring her presence. It would appear that even cats can suffer the old, “you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone” scenario and now it appears that our remaining cat, our twelve year old, fat and grouchy cat, is actually heart broken.

Who knew that an independent, stand-offish feline could feel such agony? Never before have I witnessed acute animal longing. Cato prowls the house by day yowling, omni-present, underfoot and on top of key boards, all together fierce with a new need for attention. By night he cries from his place in the attic that has grown that much darker, that much colder and bleak without the presence of his female, feline friend. He is a shell of a cat, just patching it together. It turns out that he needed Julia in a deeply meaningful way and now that she is gone, he suffers.

It almost breaks my heart save for the fact that I am so pissed off after an entire night of listening to him wail from the attic that I ripped open the attic door and carried him to the back porch this morning, tossing him unlovingly to the elements, banishing him to the outside, desperate for just an hour of peace.

He now sits atop the grill, just below the kitchen window and mews to come in, crying with loneliness. His pain evident and outward and on the wind for all the neighborhood cats to hear. He has given up on pretense and pride. He is publicly ravaged. I feel like taking him aside and saying, “You know, Cato, I understand your regret, It’s always better to have said too much than to never have said what you need to say.” But in his cathood, he is inconsolable. And we can do nothing but weep right along with him.

Each time she pushes all that emotional energy up and out, hauntingly suffering through the refrain,

Though I’ve tried, I’ve fallen…
I have sunk so low
I messed up
Better I should know
So don’t come round here
And tell me I told you so…

there’s a wretched nest of cotton that settles in my throat and the blur of tears in my eyes. It’s positively masochistic this putting myself front row at her concert of melancholy. Totally incongruous on a May day with fragile sprigs of lawn poking up through the moist and fertile earth, with rabbits sniffing around the perennial garden and robins hopping through the grass in search of fat, fat worms. The sky is the very shade of blue reserved for Spring and sea shore weddings. I am alien and awkward in this brilliance that surrounds me.

And possibly, just possibly this sadness has a wee bit to do with the two fliers that came home in O’s backpack this week. One informing us of another lice outbreak and the other about the presence of pin worm in the school.

Now please pop on over to the scene of Sarah McLachlan drowning herself in the bath tub and her wrecked lover tearing apart their pied-a-terre and you’ll need not imagine the depths I’ll sink to should either of those vermin enter our home.

The opposing team was twenty deep and they made up for their lack of talent by having the most over-wrought parents in the history of six year old soccer squads. There is supposed to be one coach per team on the field orchestrating play, acting as casual referees. There are no whistles. There are multiple water breaks. We are supposed to stop and wait for shoes to be tied and shin guards adjusted and every once in awhile someone cries and we stop for that too. But this squad (I’ll call them the Collies in interest of anonymity), took the field with a shockingly aggressive attitude. They had three parents on the field at all times yelling, I mean yelling at their players, not cheering or making hopeful suggestions but physically moving the girls around, harping on them when their attention wandered, herding them up and back, barking orders. The Collies didn’t stop for our four girls when we needed a cleat tied or a water break or when little Samantha got hit in the nose and needed to have a good sob.

They were fixated on the win (the Collie parents), driving their progeny towards the goal. the children responded with the energy and purpose of kids accustomed to an afternoon of parental reprisal should they lose the game. As soon as I heard one parent say, “Just throw it in, it doesn’t matter if the other team’s ready,” I knew it was time to dig in ’cause that’s what we Greyhounds do. We take the challenge and chase the bait and run our little fannies off just to deny the families of privilege their expected victory. And the Greyhounds, all four of them, took on the twenty-deep Collie squad and kicked their well groomed asses. I’ve been cruising on that sweet victory for three days now.

After the soccer game, there was a baseball game attended by normal and well balanced parents wearing layers of fleece under rain gear all of which have developed the indisputable signs of ensuing head colds, the Derby party, (which was fun and festive save for the dead horse at the finish line which cast the momentary shadow of gloom (death is good like that) and made the party guest claiming second place in the betting pool feel somehow dishonest. We polled the group as to how important it was that your horse actually trot off the race track and came to unanimous decision that Eight Belles won second place fair and square despite the fact that her life ended minutes later and therefore second place prize money should be paid out. Then we all indulged in another round of mint juleps, desperate to shake off the grim reality of that scene with the equine ambulances on the racetrack). By the time Sunday rolled around, a tennis-related conflict was merely the cherry on the cake of a strange and surreal 48 hours.

It’s a big week in tennis for me and my team mates. We have cruised through the semi-finals after winning our division and now play for the banner and cheesy little plastic trophies on Wednesday. A few of us thought it’d be a good idea to get together Sunday morning and bat the ball around. When we made these tennis plans earlier in the week, 8 a.m. didn’t sound as early as it felt the morning after a bourbon-centric dinner party. Needless to say, my goals for the morning were simple: stay upright; don’t throw up on the service line. To quote W’s hackneyed phrase – mission accomplished.

While we weren’t out there breaking records with serve speed or the velocity of our over heads, we all played decently and got some important touch on the ball before the big match. Since I was concentrating on the basics, like breathing and holding down breakfast, I wasn’t really focused on the score of the games we were playing nor was I really paying a whole lot of attention to the play strategy on the other side of the court. But after receiving a Sunday afternoon e-mail comprised of a bulleted dissection of my play that morning complete with tight analysis of my partner and I’s failure to talk on the court and the observation that we forgot to bring our power serves that morning, I was left feeling that I had missed the memo on the purpose of Sunday morning play which, I had always thought was for extra practice, but had apparently, somewhere along the way, turned into an opportunity for team mates to play professional coach and develop laundry lists of observed errors and oversights to deliver to each other’s in-boxes later in the day.

It may have been a well intentioned attempt to help us be successful in Wednesday’s match but it came off as a pedantic, scolding and obviously flawed analysis of our tennis game by someone who usually plays a lower court than we do and has no claim to professional prospective. Timing, delivery and personal claim to authority on the topic at hand are important factors to consider when playing critic.

I probably should have let it slide, let it simmer in my in-box for awhile. But then I wouldn’t be me. So I promptly fired off a passive aggressive retort designed to signify my displeasure while pointing out that until this team mate develops her own version of a pace serve instead of that marshmallow she’s currently putting in the service box, she will never understand the difficulty of firing off a ninety mile an hour missive while swallowing your own stomach bile.

I also couldn’t pass up the opportunity to point out that her greatest strength on the court is her partner, who is a lefty and therefore causes all manner of trouble for those of us who have been trained to target backhands down the middle. I congratulated her on the success they’ve enjoyed as team this year and pointed out that she should be very thankful for her alliance with someone who makes her opponents have to stop, think and completely alter all instinctual play.

Here’s how some of my reply e-mail went:

Truth be told, I took the court this morning after a long night of mint juleps and about three hours sleep – so the point for me was to have fun and get some touch on the ball before Wednesday. I was in no way expecting a dissertation on our play nor am I prepared to give a dissertation on your game…I was really just trying to stay upright and didn’t have the mental equilibrium to be taking notes.

What I will say is that I think we all have strengths and weaknesses as tennis players. One of the great advantages that you and your partner have is her left-handedness. She’ll always be an asset on the court b/c all the text book rules on where to put the ball are reversed for your opponents. A lot of thinking often leads to errors on the part of the team who has to change their instinctual play. It will always take your opponents some time to adjust to the awkwardness of the set up. That’s a huge boon for you guys.

As for my partner and I not using our big serves until late in the game – Anyone with a power serve will tell you that doubles is a difficult forum in which to rush the hard, fast serve. It takes awhile to warm up and since, in doubles, a player only serves every four games rather than every other, the pace serve is usually the weapon that doesn’t turn fully fire up until the second set. It’s just a matter of needing to be loose, relaxed and warm when going for the big serve.

The spin serve is the safety serve that players often need to use at the beginning of play, when they are feeling pressure or when they haven’t yet found their groove. Even tournament tennis players have to fight out of early match jitters and find the muscle fluidity to begin putting in ace serves (This obviously takes the ranked professional player less time than it takes those of us who play recreationally. There have been whole matches that I haven’t found my big serve. But a spin serve is better than a double fault. I suspect that as you develop the pace on your serve, you will see what I’m talking about.)

Wednesday’s a big day, but I think our entire team can be satisfied that we’ve all played a great season, no matter what happens. I won’t be presumptuous and tell you that you should change things in the last week of a thirty week season right before a final. Obviously, whatever you’ve been doing has been working for you thus far.

As with everything, some days on the tennis court are better than others. We can all hope for a good day on Wednesday but most importantly we can congratulate ourselves on a season well played, regardless of the outcome of Wednesday’s match.

It’s uber-important that we all trust ourselves, trust our partners and just go out there and play tennis this week without getting caught up in the import of the playoff moment, without trying to change our game or the dynamics we’ve established on the court already with our partners, at the last minute, in the nervous rush of pre-match jitters.

I plan to do what I do. I hope to do it well and with confidence. I plan to take it one point at a time. My partner and and I have a little mantra now…watch the seams of the ball, concentrate on breathing between points, be in the moment.

All I can hope for is that she and I leave the court feeling like we played well – win, lose or draw. I wish that for you too. Keep it light, keep it fun, don’t think too hard.

Okay, so it wasn’t quite the bitch slap I really wanted to deliver. I do have some self restraint, knowing when to avoid being un-salvageably vituperative. Even I could see that it was not a good idea to start my reply with,

Dear Team Mate And Average Tennis Player Who I Used to Call Friend But Now, After Today’s E-mail and Last Week’s Odd Decision to Begin Serving While Your Opponent Was Standing At the Sideline Having A Drink of Water, May Be More of an Acquaintance,

Who died and made you coach?

Like sands through the hour glass, those are the days of our lives and so the world turns here on Wisteria Lane where shiny happy people take their psycho-pharmaceuticals and play tennis while ignoring ethnic cleansing in Africa, the slow ravages of cancer, the high price of gasoline, the war in Iraq and the debacle which is the Democratic Primary.

To quote the Talking Heads, again, “You may ask yourself – well, how did I get here?