Mar 9, 2020 3 min read

When I think about things that get better with time, I think about cheese, wine and Sam Elliott’s mustache. When I think about things that do not get better with time, I think about milk, meat left in the sun and my own mustache.

And, of course, my tennis game.

My sister and I had our first match of the year last week, and I need you to understand the level of exaggeration I’ve reached to even be able to call it a match. At any rate, this was our first attempt at swinging the racket for the year.

This is our third year getting together to swing at balls, and I suppose, if I’m being extremely generous, I have seen some improvement. For example, we managed to keep ourselves contained to one court this time, instead of the extreme, four-court dash we had to maintain to even come close to touching a ball three years ago.

I’m not sure what happened to my tennis ability. I mean, I was never headed for the pro circuit, no Wimbledon trophy was ever in my future, and the likelihood of me even being asked to play in a charity tournament was not on my docket. But I used to have a modicum of skill worth mentioning.

When I was fifteen, I attended a summer program called Upward Bound. It was designed to give first generation college kids a leg up on their studies and offer cultural experiences that would make us more ready and able to obtain a degree.

It was a life saver for a poor, isolated, teenager like me.

The camp was hosted at that time by a local university and lasted six weeks each summer. Participants stayed on the campus, getting a taste of what dorm life was like, and went to classes, cultural events, team-building exercises and the like.

During our free time, we had a myriad of choices, but I often chose basketball or tennis.

Or walking to get ice cream. I’m an enigma, I know.

Our camp counselors were college students who were earning work study or a stipend for our six-week stay, and for a year or two, one of them was a tennis player for the school team.

I have not deluded myself into thinking I was ever as good as he – I remember that when he chose, he aced me without really trying – but I was able to volley steadily, serve within the box, and keep the ball in the lines. I knew how to keep score and was decent at strategically lobbing the ball to the opposite area of the court from where my opponent stood ready. He didn’t hate playing against me.

Nowadays, I can barely lob the ball over the net. I haven’t served from the line in the three years we’ve been playing, and our rules say that if we can play the ball, we do, regardless of how many bounces it has taken and whether it was even hit inside the lines.

Still, we enjoy the activity.

And, we are managing to stay on the same court now, so technically we are improving a little. Maybe in year six or seven we’ll learn to serve properly or put the one-bounce rule back into effect. Maybe we’ll consider keeping score at some point when we do that.

And maybe, occasionally, we’ll skip tennis in favor of getting ice cream. I’d be OK with that, too.