Friday Pickleball Plus

A long week was lengthened to epic proportions by a pickleball match, the longest, most epic pickleball match I've ever played . . . instead of heading straight to happy hour, Catherine and I drove over to Castleton Park yesterday afternoon and played some fun games with some of the youngsters that are now playing there, but then Ryan Cheng and his girlfriend shows up-- Ryan played tennis for Yale and he's 24 and his girlfriend is also a tennis player and she's 22 and they are both obsessed with pickleball now, so I played one last match with them and Vanessa-- another college athlete, a basketball player-- and it was 7-7 for twenty minutes or so, and the game must have taken forty minutes-- Hanna and I lost to a couple of rocket-speed overheads from Ryan but it was a really fun game and pickleball is a wonderful sport because old people can actually compete with young people and then Catherine and I couldn't really get back to Highland Park, because unbeknownst to us, it was homecoming and the traffic was all fucked up, so it was easier to go through New Brunswick-- we stopped at Tavern-on-George and it was getting cold outside so we were relegated to the newly renovated basement because there was some alumni party upstairs, where we ate some sliders and had some beers . . . and I definitely smelled bad but no one seemed to notice down there and the other thing to remember about homecoming is that people from all over the state come into town, driving their giant fucking pick-up-trucks and SUVs and Suburbans and Yukons and Expeditions and these behemoths don't fit in parking garages or city parking spaces-- these cars should be outlawed in urban zones-- we saw several parking atrocities in the deck, including a giant white pickup wedging itself between two cars, scraping the side of the car on the passenger side-- mayhem.