Scenes From A Park

Well, I really enjoyed my day off yesterday. I slept in until about 10:45. It was much needed, believe me. Went to a cookout Thursday night. Hamburgers, hot dogs, pork chops. Mmmm! Decided to go play tennis after lunch yesterday. Two equally interesting, yet entirely separate events occurred while we were there.

The bitter end
We had only been there a few minutes when two separate cars pulled up in the parking lot, and I noticed a girl and guy sitting on one of the picnic tables over by the batting cages. They appeared to just be talking or whatever, sitting next to each other, so I turned my attention back to tennis. A short while later, I heard a girl screaming, almost like she was in pain. Then I hear her yelling things that you typically hear when couples are fighting, like "I did the best I could do" and "You have always accused me of that." So over the next few minutes, she proceeds to let this guy have it. Finally, he gets in his car, and she kneels by his window and continues her barrage.

I imagined that he was in that "just let this hurry up and be over with" mindset that guys sometimes have. You know it's coming and you know it's going to be bad, but you also know that if you can just make it thru this final face-to-face assault, that you'll be free and clear and over the wall into West Berlin. At the same time, I could see her heart breaking and imagined that she probably had that feeling that her world was crumbling all around her. Another situation we have probably all experienced. Watching her clinging to whatever was left, seeing her love and feelings expressed in anger and tears, I wanted to tell her that she deserved so much better and that everything was going to be OK. (Of course, I didn't.) Finally, he sped out of the parking lot, squealing the tires on his 1984 Honda Civic, as she walked back to her car, feeling empty and lonely, heart broken in two. At least that's how I imagined it. It was just a very real, raw display of emotion and of the human condition.

Almost Famous
It was about twelve thousand degrees outside, and I was sweatin' like an Iraqi POW at Abu Ghraib. A WAFF-48 cameraman approached us and asked if he could take some footage of us playing tennis. They were doing some story on how hot it was and being outdoors in the heat or whatever. Well, Kyle tightened up like Tim Duncan shooting free throws in the 4th quarter of the NBA Finals. It was like this: Serve, net. Serve, net. Run to retrieve the balls. Serve, net. Serve, net. I was just laughing. So finally, he was like, "Here, you try." So I got my second serve over. We hit a couple of groundstrokes, then he lunged for one and hits it clear over the fence behind me. For some reason, after about two minutes of our dazzing display, the camera guy left. So I got home and watched the 5:00 news. The heat story was the second story they did, but almost inexplicably, they didn't use any of our tennis footage.

OK, I'm out for now. Hope you all have a good and safe weekend and a happy 4th of July.

"Please tell me why, my car is in the front yard, and I'm sleepin' with my clothes on. I came in thru the window last night, and you're gone..."