Tag: Tennis

It’s not lucky to be almost assassinated

It’s not lucky to be almost assassinated

She came to me at nine years old with an incomplete backstory. No longer a viable breeder after age five or six, the owners kept her way past her financial contribution to the family. She’d delivered two litters a year, about 100 puppies. “We just liked her,” they told me. My inquiry, “I’m an old lady dog-lover, looking for an old-lady dog companion,” hit just the right tone. “You’re an answer to our prayers.” And so I got Elsa.

The day after the attempted assassination of the former president, I hungered for Sunday air. You know, the first day of the week kind of air, where everything starts over. Air that requires nothing. No lofty thoughts, no reflection, no opinions, judgments, or conclusions. Sunday air. I breathe Sunday air when singing a well-known hymn like “It is well with My Soul”.

When peace like a river, attendeth my way

When sorrows like sea billows roll

Whatever my lot

Thou hast taught me to say

It is well, it is well, with my soul

And when the preacher elevates my being with no effort on my part, I breathe in the Sunday air of love. 

Sunday air was unattainable at church last week, though. It was not well with my soul. Right off, the preacher prayed “for former President Trump, grateful he did not succumb to political violence. This world is in love with violence, a violence that threatens the best in us, so renew in us a commitment to the Christ, who calls us to turn the other cheek, to love our neighbor, to love our enemies.” On receiving this, I sucked in a big chunk of we’re-gonna-lose and couldn’t seem to exhale.

The sermon choked off any puff of relief— a parable about prayer that meant nothing to me. My diaphragm would have swelled during hymn-singing, but the tunes were unfamiliar yawns.

And so, airless, I vamoosed to the outdoors, home to fetch Elsa for a trip to the park to watch tennis players sweat it out. She was too hot to sniff around the edges and lazed in the shade instead. Until a tennis ball bounced toward her behind the chain link fence. She bolted for it and dug into the wire to try to slay that green fuzzy rodent stunt double. She would have broken her teeth to get to it. A tennis player picked up the ball, a good ball, and tossed it over the fence with big Sunday air to Elsa, who received it with the gusto of a kid catching bubbles. She flaunted her prize using all the primal dog moves that delight dog-loving humans. I never knew she was a ball dog. 

Echoing Bill Maher, Bulwark podcaster Tim Miller asked his spirit guide and Managing Editor, Sam Stein: 

“Can I say Trump is the luckiest dog on the planet?”

“No! You can’t say that.”

“I can’t?” Asked Miler.

“No! It’s not lucky to be almost assassinated.” Said Stein.

But Elsa. She’s a lucky dog.

Hooligans in the Temple

Hooligans in the Temple

Standing in the driveway at 1000 Michigan Avenue in Wilmette, where we had lived for about a month, I posed with my tennis racket and ball while Erin snapped my picture with our family’s 1958 Kodak Brownie 127. We were playing in front of the garage doors on the west side of the house, an architectural oddity built into the side of the cliff overlooking Lake Michigan. The sun overhead lobbed burning sunbeams at my squinty-eyed face. Over my shoulder drooping into the curvy flagstone stairway leading down to our front door an overgrown lilac tree emitted a deep purple mid-June fragrance I’ve never forgotten. A robin strung together a complex trill from the upper branches of the evergreens that hugged the short driveway. My mother, not a naturalist in any sense of the word, somehow knew to teach Erin and me to recognize a robin’s song and the scent of lilacs.

We threw our rackets into our bike baskets, squeezed balls into the pockets of our Bermuda shorts and pedaled down red-bricked Michigan Avenue to our tennis lessons at

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Red Brick Road Michigan Avenue Wilmette

Gillson Park. Erin, a year younger, always aced her lessons and I always muddled through mine. We were both athletic enough but Erin outdid me in tennis. I was proud of her, and jealous.

Before heading home we rode over to Sheridan Road to the Bahia Temple. It had been open only a few years but neighborhood rumors said the big white Temple would soon be closed to the public. We laid our bikes in the greenish-blue lawn, climbed the white stairs and nonchalantly strolled around the outside. All the white doors were open but we saw no one. The stillness unnerved us. Holy. No chairs or pews sat in the white circular sanctuary. We pulled away from the white marble floor and creeped up three flights of white stairs to the white balcony. We peeked into the hush of the white holy. It was a long way down. I held a tennis ball over the white railing and looked at Erin. Her wide open face said,”let it go.” The ball fell into the white center of the sacred white floor. We froze. No one appeared. Then Erin dropped her tennis ball over the balcony. We crouched down and listened for the echoing plunk-a-plunk, then tore down the stairs and out to our bikes without looking back.

Halfway home we laughed so hard we fell into the thick grass by the side of the road. We got up and pedaled as fast as we could looking over our shoulders all the way home. We stashed our bikes in the garage as if they were evidence, and kept the secret between us until school started in the fall. Feeling invincible, we bragged about the tennis balls in the Temple to our classmates. Our crime, never exposed to adults-in-charge, fell into my ever-increasing life-bucket labeled “what I got away with.”