Just a Smidge: youth

Showing posts with label youth. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 17, 2024

I'm in a Pickle

My mother-in-law is turning 80 years young in a few months. She taught our family the game of pickleball. She also taught me that saying cheesy things like “80 years young” is far more beneficial to our relationship than saying “80 years old.”

Pickleball, as you may have noticed, is gaining popularity at a rapid rate. Play it once, and you’ll be hooked, unless you are a tennis player.

If you play tennis, and are serious about it, which every tennis player seems to be, you will not like pickleball ever, because you will refuse to try pickleball, because pickleball is loud and adds annoying extra lines to what are supposed to be TENNIS courts, and it’s loud, and the people who play it laugh and shout, and there is no place for that kind of thing on a tennis court, because tennis is a serious and quiet sport and pickleball looks and sounds fun and loud and there is absolutely no place for fun anywhere near tennis courts!

But, if you actually enjoy having fun, chances are great that you’ll like pickleball. A lot of its popularity comes from how scalable the game is. A group of very athletic twenty-somethings can have a lightning-fast game of doubles on the court next to the group of ninety-somethings with only one original hip joint between the four of them, enjoying a much slower-paced game of the exact same rules on the exact same size court.

We are currently spending the week down in beautiful Morro Bay, California, at my mother-in-law’s house. She is the treasurer for the Morro Bay Pickleball Association, which has four dedicated pickleball courts annoyingly close to two dedicated tennis courts. So close, in fact, that you can sometimes almost hear the tennis players disapproval of all the fun over the noise of all the fun.

The MBPA consists of a very large group of retired people all over the age of 70, who can all kick my ass in pickleball.

That’s the hard lesson I had to learn when I started playing. I don’t think we could name another sport that exists that my mother-in-law could beat me at. She is an incredibly active 79-year-old, but I still have every sports advantage over her, simply because of our age, size, and strength gap.

I really can’t think of another sport – even the ones I’ve never played. I mean, neither of us have ever played jai alai – neither of us even really know what it is – but I guarantee I come out on top if we played a match, or game, or set, or whatever they call it.

But then there’s pickleball - the great equalizer. It’s the one physical activity that legitimately qualifies as a sport that I’m aware of where nothing about your size, strength, or age is going to help you gain an advantage over the lady who plays for three hours a day, even though she’s 79, weighs 90 pounds, and has no cartilage in any of her joints anymore.

And I had come to terms with that fact, after playing with her and her friends enough. It was OK. Pickleball is just like that. I don’t play or practice enough to be very good, so it’s OK if I get beat by old ladies. That was fine.

But then the little kids showed up.

There we were the other day, enjoying a loud, fun time and annoying the adjacent tennis players, when a grandpa showed up to the pickleball courts. He had his two grandsons with him, and they were only six and eight years old.

To our surprise, grandpa took the court with the six-year-old as his doubles partner.

An unsuspecting couple who appeared to be in their early sixties were on the other side of the net. They got destroyed.

Grandpa was good, but his grandson was amazing. Covering the whole back court and hitting a two-handed forehand and backhand, he could place it anywhere he wanted. If the couple was playing back, he’d drop it right over the net. If they were too far forward, he’d make them pay for their foolish behavior by lobbing a beautiful shot over their heads right to the back line.

His eight-year-old brother was laying on the side of the court at the net, casually watching the action. I asked him their ages and which one of them was better. With absolutely no braggadocio in his answer, he said, “I’m a little better than he is.” Just stating the facts.

So, what that meant was, if I found the best doubles partner I could come up with from my circle, which would probably be one of my very athletic teenage sons or my mother-in-law, we still would not have stood a snowflake’s chance in hell against these two elementary-school-age brothers.

I have made my peace with taking staggering losses from my soon-to-be 80-year-old mother-in-law, but I draw a hard line at getting embarrassed by a second-grader and his kindergartner brother.

Maybe I’ll take up tennis.

See you soon,

-Smidge

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Wednesday, July 27, 2022

The Key to Our Security

I found a great new reality show that I’m really enjoying. There’s only three episodes, but I am loving watching them over and over again. Unfortunately for you all, I can’t really recommend the show, because it’s all footage from my Ring doorbell camera.

Allow me to explain.

We went on vacation last week, and our good friends’ son, who is a teammate of Son Number Two, and a young man we know and love, moved into our house to dog sit for us. He’s about to be a senior in high school, which makes the show even more entertaining.

In the first episode, our main character comes over to the house for the first time. He spends quite a bit of time at the front door fiddling with the lock before he actually went into the house. Our dog thought it was awesome, and continually barked “I’m so happy you’re here! Please come in!” at the window.

I wasn’t quite sure what he was waiting for, since I knew he wasn’t scared of the dog, but eventually he went in the house and I didn’t think much of it, until Episode Two.

Our main character is a social animal, much like our Labrador, and he had a number of friends over during the week. One of his friends, who is also a teammate of Son Number Two, ended up taking over for him one afternoon/evening when our main character had to work a long shift at his summer job. Episode Two of my new favorite show began on our front porch with our main character painstakingly teaching his stand-in dog sitter how to lock and unlock our front door using the key.

It was only then that I realized how important to the series Episode One had been. Prior to coming to our house, neither of these monkeys had ever used a key to unlock a door. They had both grown up with keypad-entry front doors. Episode One was our main character figuring out how the whole confounding key/lock system worked. I was mesmerized.

Just when I thought the series was limited to only two episodes, our good friends’ girls from down the street came over to walk our dog with her sister. (To clarify, our dog and their dog are sisters. The neighbor girls are also sisters. All were involved.)

The key that our main character had in his possession works normally. The key that our friends down the street have was cut a little wonkily. It opens the door just fine, but you have to jiggle it a little bit to get it to turn at first. This added an exciting dimension to Episode Three, and extended it well past the length of the first two episodes combined.

In all, four different girls attempted to unlock our front door before finally gaining entry. After retrieving our dog and her leash, it actually took even longer for them to re-lock the door, apparently not learning much about the ingredients of success on the entry. It was magical entertainment.

Apparently, we are the only house left among our friends that still has keyed doors. It seems, in the not-too-distant future, this will be a new level of security, along with a new level of convenience. Soon, we won’t have to carry our keys around with us. We can simply lock our doors and leave the keys hanging on a hook on the porch.

I’m sure at some point advanced thieves will figure out some code scanning software that can read the keypad door locks and produce the codes. It’s probably already an Android app. The thing is, anyone advanced enough to use the code scanning software will also be young enough to apparently not know how keys work. It’s a lot like how we adults can now write coded messages that teenagers can’t crack simply by writing in cursive.

My old, keyed door lock will soon be more secure than a keypad combination lock, at a fraction of the cost.