Persistence
In the 1970s, at the top of a small mountain near the Finger Lakes, my parents drove our stations wagon into the entrance of Wig-Wam Harbor. For at least six years, Wig-Wam was our vacation destination every August. The place had been a farm. Now it was an upstate campsite with sparse woods, a view overlooking Keuka Lake, a couple of grassy hillsides near the top, and a pond nestled close to the underbelly of the tallest of the lush Wig-Wam slopes.
The family-run campsite had installed a pool as well. It sat half in the ground and half above. The owners kept pool pumps running most of the time but the water turned frigid overnight, probably because the mountain nights got down to forty-five degrees. On many mornings, we swam anyway. We splashed around until our our lips turned blue. Sometimes that took half an hour, sometimes less.
When we couldn't bear the pool, we played on the tetherball pole next to the pond. After we whacked the tetherball until our hands burned and we staggered, drunk with effort, we hiked up to the recreation center.
In theory, the recreation center had things to do. You could buy worms there to use as bait in the stocked fishing pond. You could buy gumballs from machines. You could buy plastic toys from other, neighboring machines for a dime. Mostly, though, the place was a low, one-story farm building converted into a holding area for sterile equipment that was decades old, didn't work, and could almost seem interesting for a minute but not really. The main reason we ventured into the center was it had a ping-pong table at the back. (It had a pool table, too, but it cost a dollar to play, so no one could afford it.)
Next to the ping-pong table sat a gumball-style dispenser with a few white, plastic spheres inside. For a quarter, you could turn the crank, buy a ping-pong ball, and play games while it lasted.
Once, I found a quarter on the street during a visit to town.
"Did someone just drop it?" my parents chided me. "You should make sure no one's looking for it." Apparently, I had gotten suspiciously good at finding lost change. I wandered along the nearest street for a minute, looking people over, deciding they were unworthy, and finally I pocketed the quarter.
"I'm going to play ping-pong," I told my cousins and my uncle. My parents had been stingy with their quarters because we kept breaking the cheap, plastic balls.
Still, we played whenever we had the money. We preserved the balls for hours, sometimes for days, but eventually, after hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of whacks, smashes, pokes in the eye, accidental kicks, drops against the concrete floor, or finger-smashing cracks between two paddles near the net, the balls broke. They didn't simply give up all at once. Usually, they acquired a critical flaw and we could massage the wounded plastic sphere with a blip of tape. Sometimes we played with a jagged, crazy-bouncing ball until we exploded it with a smash that sent bits in multiple directions, sometimes as hostile chunks, more often as delicate hemispherical curves that floated in the air like feathers, twirling, before descending, to our sighs and to their ruin.
Sometimes we could find one or two pieces but not a critical missing chunk. We had been warned to keep the rec center clean and to throw away the broken stuff. Once, after yet another sad ending to our game, we couldn't find any pieces at all. My little brother said a part had flown outside but we didn't see where in the grass it might have gone. The other piece or pieces must have rolled under the shelves of the camping stoves or the racks of fishing lines and poles, we guessed. The disappearance made the older kids laugh.
It was my idea, I think, to hold a ping-pong tournament.
Usually, we played doubles. More kids could play that way. Plus, I hated waiting for the others to finish a game. We played 'winner keeps the table' style, so losing meant sulking at the edges of the rec center or sitting on a stool, kicking the air. Joining in teams of two to a side kept our idle times to a minimum.
"We should draw lots if we're going to have a contest," said my uncle. He was tall, thin, and fair minded. (He was still two years away from discovering that he could win endlessly in tetherball by keeping the ball too high for my short, jumping-bean self to reach.)
"Fine." I felt strict about fairness, too. If I got an older cousin I couldn't beat, that was fine. I wanted to try.
Unfortunately, I got my girl cousin, Annie, as my first opponent. She was too happy to let me win because I was trying so hard. After that, the tournament memory is a blur. I think I won but, toward the end, it simply didn't matter. We only played for two hours and I wanted to keep playing. I tried to make my cousins skip lunch with me. They shook their heads and left. My younger brother stayed with me the longest.
Eventually, even he shook his head, said, "I'm getting hungry" and put down his paddle.
That afternoon, I persuaded everyone to try a doubles tournament and we kept going until dinner. When we started that week, I had not been anywhere near as good as my older uncles and cousins. I improved, though. We all did. The more we trained ourselves during the long, summer week, the better our games progressed. Once, our volleys had lasted a few seconds. Now, they lasted for minutes. We ran to get the longest shots. Often enough, we made them.
At a certain point, I noticed that the more we played, the more tired and discouraged the others got. If I played my older cousins in the morning, I couldn't win. If I played them after an hour of games, I often did. I could outlast the people who were better than me.
"Again?" my cousin asked.
"Yes!" I shouted with glee. Because it had become my strategy. Soon, although I didn't know it, this was going to become a favorite tactic throughout my teenaged life.
Not everyone was used to playing alone, one to a side, but I was ready. I tried to keep long, long volleys going. I liked the action. And I could force other people to make mistakes. Once I noticed I could wear people down, it became my favorite method. Soon I would apply it to tetherball, tennis, and anything else requiring endurance. It wasn't simply a matter of being in better aerobic shape. My mantra inside my head became, 'I can out-care them.' (Out-caring does not, as I found out in tetherball and basketball, make me six feet tall. It does not solve every tactical problem.)
I realized I could be a steady winner by virtue of being fanatical. Extremism was my path to success. This was not the same as being the best at something, of course. I simply cared so much that I stayed on the field when all my competitors left.
By the time I was a teenager, I could out-care anyone who had a modicum of sense. (Unfortunately for them, most people do have some.) Too often, I cultivated a militant streak that came naturally to me. That's a dangerous thing. When coupled with my discovery that I was better at fighting than talking and better at taking a punch than most people were at punching, I became, just a little, someone who wouldn't let go of arguments. Even people who liked me, even my best of friends, clearly thought at times I was a bit much.
But I loved my friends anyway. And when they were irritated and told me to fuck off, I wouldn't. Because their anger was temporary. And my persistence was not. I still loved them; I would out-care them. I could wait through a minute of punches, an hour of scowls. I could hear insults, scowl back and, eventually, make them laugh.
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