Our adversary the Wall

As part of our summer action plan, Bobbis and I have taken up playing tennis after work. Not for us the country club lawn tennis, oh no. Ours is the city-slicker kind, which takes place in a half-court in little court yard against a large stone wall. A fair hybrid of raquetball and tennis, really.


Still, who are we to complain. After all, we have a clean, open space in a city that's generally devoid of cleanliness and space.


Its a 25-foot wall we play against, pretty tall by any reasonable standards. Fairly easy to have a decent game without hitting the balls into the private property behind. Or so one would think.


The first time we played, we sent all three fly-balls whizzing over the wall, into the unaccessible backyard of the building beyond. So there we were, half an hour into our game with nothing to show for it except an empty can of missing tennis balls. We were about to trudge off ashamedly, when the kind people on the "court" next to ours offered us a loaner ball. "Here, use this one," they said.

I tried to point out to them that history indicated that this ball, too, would very likely end up in the black hole on the other side, but they were pretty adamant about their generosity, so hey, who are we to argue.

So I took the ball.
I served.
And even though (I still maintain to this day) I hit a low, hard, perfect serve, the ball ended up flying skywards and over the wall. I couldn't believe it. I was horrified.


But our neighbours just laughed, they had long learned the lessons of playing tennis against a wall.


Since then, we've come up with a strategy so as not to bankrupt ourselves buying tennis balls all summer. Here they are, listed in order of priority and plausibility:

a) Make a friend in the neighbouring building, into whose backyard we have been hitting the balls; use the friendship mercilessly as our means to ball-augmentation

b) Dress in black in the middle of the night, scale the wall, and get our balls back (only has appeal if we can dress like Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment)

c) Get balls at wholesale value from Sam's Club (less exciting, but more realistic)

d) Improve our tennis and stop hitting fly-balls over the wall (neither exciting nor realistic)