It stood before us, pristine, untouched. It shouted to us words of promise. "You can do this!", "This will be fun and so easy!" It looked so innocent that beach volley ball court, but alas it was the master deceiver.
One of my face-book friends put up a post asking for teams for our local beach volleyball league. I was assured that it was more of a "beer league". That would be perfect, because my athletic ability is like an individual who has been on a 10 day bender. I imagined my husband and I sharing a laugh with our friends. What the heck, I'm going to put together a team I thought. In my faulty imagination Christopher and I were all tanned (and maybe 40 pounds lighter, and looking like we were in either a Coppertone ad or a beer ad), we were throwing back our heads laughing, sometimes my head would gently touch the head of one of my friends in shared laugher. Oh this is a good idea. I signed us up.
I was feeling gleeful thinking about all the exercise and good fun we were going to have. I then received my emailed copy of the roster. I took notice of the familiar names that the same roster had been mailed to, the young, physically fit team captains. A sense of foreboding began to niggle into my blissful delusion. My brain revisited the earlier fantasy of volleyball. In the new revised fantasy I looked the way I do in real life. My husband who is competitive and believes himself to be a star athlete, pushes me out of the way to return the ball, knocking me down, face in the sand. Sadly this is a more accurate fantasy, than the Coppertone one.
Wednesday night my friend, and fellow teammate emailed me "Instead of our usual Thursday morning coffee, how about we go to the volleyball pit and practice." I could hear the panic in those typed words. Apparently she was feeling a bit of fear. Thursday morning my friend picked me up, and then we picked up our third friend / teammate and we headed over to the beach volleyball pit. We pulled up.
The court was beautifully groomed, untouched. The wind gently blew the net, inviting us to play. Trepedatiously we walked over, all three of us in flip flops. We scanned the sand looking for glass, it was all clear. Slowly we took off our shoes, the cool sand pushing through our toes. The court was so much bigger than I thought it would be. It's four on, how could all four of us cover so much territory? We decided to practice. I served the ball, hey I was better at that than I remembered. The ball flew strongly over the net. Maybe this would not be quite as hard as I thought, and then the ball came back at me. I squealed like a little girl, flinching and running from the ball. Oh dear, we were in trouble. After practicing for 10 minutes (and panting for breath) or so we decided that that would be enough, we could go for our coffee. I'm no athlete, but I rock at drinking coffee!
Our first game is in two weeks. I hope that our team, aptly named "Last Place" will not irritate the other teams too much. Hopefully they will find us to fun and entertaining. Hopefully they will not hurl insults and rocks at us... I guess we'll see in two weeks. In the meantime, I think that maybe we should have a team practice. So we will not be winning any awards, the best that we can hope for is perhaps a participant ribbon.
No comments:
Post a Comment