Month: September 2022

Pickleball? Yeah, That Sounds Like Fun or Myron’s Pickleball Altercation

So, tell me, Myron, what happened.

I got into an altercation in the park.

Did you get hurt? What kind of an altercation? What park?

The park by Brooklyn Bridge.

Did anyone get hurt? Did the police come?

No, no. Nothing.

What nothing? You look a wreck.

It got a little heated. Nobody got hurt. Millstein stepped in before anything got out of hand. Millstein’s a big guy. He stepped in.

Where did he step in, Myron. Just tell me what happened. What did you do?

I was playing doubles with Singer, and that guy Mickey something, and Rosalie.

Rosalie?

Singer’s sister-in-law, and she had to leave and so this guy comes on the court. You know, the pickleball courts by the bridge.

Yes, yes.

And so this guy I never saw before comes on and he says he’ll fill in for her and before you know it, we’re warming up doubles, and it’s not like the usual friendly game. He’s hitting smashes and boom-boom right at you. In the warm-up! And so then when we start to play, he’s telling us all where we’re supposed to stand and how to call the scores and which side we should be serving on and who goes first. And what he was saying doesn’t make any sense, it wasn’t logical at all.

Wait Myron, you have to understand, not everybody thinks like you do. Not everything has to make sense. Yes, to you it does, but not everybody. Myron, you can’t argue with some people. It’s not good for your heart. You just have to walk away. Leave it be.

I should have but I admit I was thinking I know how to play this game and who’s he to tell me? We’ve been playing all summer. Nobody said we were doing it all wrong.

And you got into an argument about some farkakteh game? Give me a break. You don’t have enough things to worry about? Now you have to worry about somebody thocking a wiffle ball at your head when you’re standing in the kitchen. Please, Myron.

It’s not that.

Then what is it?

He was serving the ball from the wrong side of the court.

And what.

So I told him and he said that I was wrong. And I told him what the rule was.

What rule?

The rule about serving from the lefthand side when your score is odd, and he tells me he’s first server and the first server serves from the right side of the court, and I tell him no and he says that’s the way it is where he plays.

And where does he play?

The Villages. In Florida.

What’s he doing playing in Brooklyn Bridge Park on a Friday morning in September?

He comes up to live with his sister in Bensonhurst for three months in the summer.

What, they don’t have air conditioning in the Villages?

I don’t know, but that’s not the point.

What is the point?

The point is that he said that he knows the rules because he plays in big tournaments and everywhere he plays they play by those rules.

What rules?

The ones about the first server. I tell him he should read the rules.

I should read the rules? he tells me, you should read the rules, he says.

Myron, listen to yourself. Calm down. Show me the rules.

Why?

Because I want to see why two grown men are arguing over something so important as a pickleball game, that’s why.

Here’s the rule book. I’ll show you.

Myron, don’t show me. Let me read the rules. Go make some tea. I’ll come in when I’m finished.

Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes pass. Myron’s tea has gotten cold. Millie comes back.

Myron, you like this game? Obviously. This game with server one and server two, but sometimes server two serves first, and alternating sides of the court, side out, side in, even, odd, a line is in, but sometimes a line is out, and what’s the score? Two-two-one? One-one-what? Who makes up a game like this. With an eighty-six page rule book, yet? You know who? People with too much time on their hands and nothing else on their minds? And they make rules so that you get into an argument with some know-it-all-from Florida yet, with a two hundred dollar uranium-coated power paddle in his hand.

Silence.

Look, Myron, I have news for you.

What.

I hate to say this, but you’re both right, I think. Both you and Mr. Florida Villages bigshot, and neither one of you is totally right. Or wrong.

What do you mean?

It’s the rules, Myron. They’re screwy. They contradict themselves. I think.

Listen to this, “Rule 4.B.2. At the start of each game, the starting server begins the serve from the side of the court dictated by the score.” Okay. Then, “Rule 4.B.6.a. At the start of each side out, service begins in the right/even serving area.” It’s starting to get confusing. And then, “Rule 4.B.6.b. When the team’s score is even, the team’s starting server’s correct position is at the right/even serving area. When the team’s score is odd, the starting server’s correct position is at the left/odd court.” That can’t be, can it?

Right. No. Yes. Right. It makes no sense. I don’t know.  

So, you can understand how someone would believe the part that doesn’t make sense to you because it’s right there in the rule book and it’s just the part that makes sense to them?

Yes. Now I do.

Listen, Myron, you go back there and if Mr. Villages is still there you tell him you’re sorry and that it’s all so confusing and no hard feelings and that he should come home with you and have a cup of tea. And, look, if he’s not there just forget about it, he’ll tell all his friends about the Brooklyn jerk he met. So what? Then next time just play with people you know and if someone new comes on the court you just say we play by the Official Brooklyn Bridge Rules, and if he has a problem with that, he should go take it to City Hall like everyone else does. On the other hand, maybe he knows what he’s talking about.

Easter Dinner at Heidi’s in SoHo

Some time ago, a college friend of Simone’s, Heidi, I recall, a tall, slender woman with near-black hair pinned back, covering just the tops of her ears, invited us to an Easter dinner at the new apartment in SoHo she bought with her partner, a man named Nathan or Natan, whose name I had forgotten and which I didn’t quite clearly hear when Heidi said it as we were coming in the door, and I was reluctant, perhaps out of simple misplaced courtesy, to ask her later to repeat it hoping she would say it again when he came into the living room, where we were seated, or perhaps, she might call his name to remind him that we had arrived, or to tell him to come in to greet us from the kitchen where he was feeding the dog.

We had not seen them since their wedding the previous spring, an affair with well over a hundred guests, at the Tavern on the Green in Central Park. At that time, it was the only occasion we had been to there and we both very much enjoyed it. In particular, I recall the setting for the reception in an enclosed tent, with flickering, lambent, afternoon light shifting slowly across the white-clothed tables, as it sifted through the tall surround of oaks and maples which were especially lush that year after seven consecutive weekends of rain in the city, much to the chagrin and concern of the local business owners who depended heavily upon the foreign and domestic tourist trade, already depressed significantly by the  global financial crisis and bank bailout in 2008. It was also the year in which I had been let go from a job I’d had for over fifteen years. The weather was cool. We were seated at a table near the bar with other friends of the couple whom we did not know and with whom we exchanged pleasantries until they got up to dance, after which we never saw them again that afternoon or, in fact, ever again.

Simone said, as we got off the subway at Spring Street, “Maybe we’ll see someone from the wedding there today.”

Heidi, in a phone conversation she had with Simone the week before Easter, said that they were not traveling this year because they had recently acquired a dog, a rescue animal which Nathan, or Natan’s, sister Ailene had adopted from the Bideawee on 38th Street several months prior and for which, sadly, she was looking for a new home as she was leaving the country and could not possibly take the poor-dear dog with her to the Bordeaux University on a Fulbright scholarship, could she? No, of course not, said Natan (let’s just call him that) to her and they’d be thrilled to take care of the dog whose name was Sartre or Merleau-Ponty, though I can’t quite recall which, but I know he was named after one of the French existentialists of the mid twentieth century, who were the subject of Ailene’s doctoral dissertation.

Sartre, I think that was the dog’s name, after finishing its dinner, strained its way into the living room where Simone and I were sitting talking with Heidi. Natan was holding the dog on a very short, taut leash which he immediately let drop and let the dog rush forward toward the couch in which Heidi, Simone, and I had settled ourselves. It stopped abruptly and crouched directly in front of her, and consequently, between Simone and myself, its front paws spread wide apart, its haunches up, looking up at her with its pink-rimmed eyes and naked gums, ready, I thought, to move in any direction.

“He simply adores Heidi. He tolerates me well enough, but he loves Heidi,” Natan said.

The dog was a brindle. An American Staffordshire terrier who Heidi said was terribly affectionate. “Pit bulls are, you know,” she said, “but just saying that name gets such bad rap from most people. But you two are dog people, I think Simone said, so…”

“Simone is the dog person,” I said. “Not so much me but…”

“Oh, well,” Heidi said, “he’s just a baby,” she said, looking down at the dog and pursing her lips as you might in talking to an infant in a stroller. “He’s just getting used to us and his new surroundings, you know, trying to get the lay of the land, you know, figuring out who is the alpha person here and all…”

“… He’s adorable…,” Simone told her.

“But, I should tell you that you must not look him in the eye. He doesn’t handle that well. And so, I mean it’s no big deal, nothing horrible has ever happened, but just don’t look him in the eye. Just don’t.”

“Shouldn’t he be on the leash? I mean with one of you holding it?” I suggested.

“Well, no,” said Natan, “he’s better off leash, I mean, that’s pretty much what we’ve heard, that dogs on leashes get more aggressive. Right?”

And then he stood up. “I’ll make us up some plates and bring them in and we can eat and relax and talk in here. We kind of made a mistake by putting his food bowl by the table in the kitchen and now he doesn’t like it if anyone else eats in there.”

“They’re pretty territorial, I think,” said Simone, nodding her head, looking over at me.

Natan came back in with four dinner plates on a tray which he set down on a sideboard. Generous slices of spiral honey ham, mounded mashed sweet potatoes, and rows of roasted asparagus.

“Simone said you were vegetarians, I think, but this is Easter, right, and this ham is fabulous. Have you ever had it? Be vegetarian on Monday, right?”

He placed a plate on each of our laps and he took a seat in a softly upholstered chair opposite the couch and, just as quickly as he sat, he got up and carried his plate down the hall into their bedroom.

“He’ll be right back. He doesn’t feel comfortable eating, you know, meat, in front of the dog, but he’ll be back after he finishes,” said Heidi.

Turning first to Simone on her right and then to me close by on her left, she said, “I’m so glad to see you both. So much to talk about. Eat, eat. Before it gets cold.”