In the early rounds of junior tournaments they’d send you far away from check-in. To courts that turned your shoe soles red. To cement courts dimpled with fool’s gold and trilobites. To courts with foxtail grass in the cracks and bird shit stains the rain hadn’t washed away. To that roadside park by a corn field that had two courts with chain-link nets.

You and Jesus sit at a picnic bench, waiting for your name to be called: Jimmy? Gunther? 

A farmer drops a red handkerchief over a sparrow pecking in the dirt. The farmer picks the bundle up. Throws it like a racquet to the ground. Splat.

Jeez Louise, Jesus says.

“You like that PDP there?” the farmer asks you. You are a spoiled 12-year-old with a blood condition, and you'll be dead in 12 years from a bad transfusion. You hand him your new racquet made from spaceship. It is the tennis boom and farmers had memberships at racquet clubs, wore tennis togs like celebrities.

He unzips the white cover with the orange letters and hands it to you. He takes a beginner's lilting swings with the racquet. Forehand. Backhand.

“God almighty that’s light,” he says to himself.

Bird Report

Wind advisory today. Gusts up to 45+mph. Nothing but turkey vultures in the sky. They’re hanging in the air absentmindedly. They rise and drop against the current of the wind, calm as fish in a brook.