It's impossible for me to believe that some day I'll be like the old people playing tennis on the court next to me. I cannot imagine running slower or hitting slower or running within a smaller circumference. That drop shot over the net: I want to get it, desperately. This serve I toss into the air, I want to slam it, viciously. That shot you put into the corner, on the line: I will retrieve it, easily. I cannot imagine that this ligament, this tendon, this bone will ever fail me. I am the Honda of man.
My soul has carried this body--these knees, this chest, these eyes, these fingers--for thirty years to this baseline in this fall sunlight on this hill in my city, and like the conductor of a symphony, it's using them all in concert, mechanically and fluidly. The melody that resonates out of my body is not music but pleasure of my own physicality, not harmony but the animal joy of paying singular attention to the moment, the moment symbolized in a 2-ounce neon ball, and that moment is glinting over the net now, towards me, and I must react because if I don't, then I'm not playing game. If I don't react, what am I even doing here?
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