Growing up I never really got into sports … particularly team sports.  I was on the swim team and I did compete in rollerskating but those were still mostly individual.  There were two other sports I loved but my family did not have the money for me to pursue; horseback riding and tennis.  I do still have my original wooden Chris Evert tennis racket, which I was so proud to get as a little girl.  At a time when sports was still a man’s world, this American woman was ranked the world’s number one tennis player.  She won eighteen Grand Slam singles championships and three doubles titles.  Chris Evert also won a record seven championships at the French Open and Serena Williams is tied with her record of six champions at the U.S. Open.  Evert went pro in 1972, the year Title IX was enacted.  The U.S. Congress signed Title Nine into law proclaiming there could be no act of discrimination against females in any educational program or activity receiving federal financial aid of any type.  Even though it wasn’t my thing, I noticed when I was in elementary school girls’ soccer teams were beginning to form and that it was a big deal.  Three decades later I have a cousin who will be attending college next year on a soccer scholarship.  I am so proud of her and for her.  She has worked incredibly hard since her early childhood, with the tireless support of both her parents and grandparents.  It still seems wild to me that a girl could get into college for playing a sport.  When I was in community college passing a sport was required to count toward my bachelor’s degree.  I chose tennis.  I really loved that semester and didn’t dread it like I always had gym class.  I was told I was pretty good and I got an updated racket.  My husband’s paternal side is truly sports royalty and yet what has always bonded us is our shared love of reading, museums, and travel.  The travel part I have only been blessed enough to enjoy since I got married.  So I have had two rackets in my arsenal and I broke them out when I asked my husband if he’d like to play tennis with me.  I gave him my beloved Chis Evert and I played with my college one from twenty years ago that has broken strings.  It was a beautiful day and we enjoyed just hitting the ball back and forth to each other.  One of the many things I love about my husband is that he is simply not competitive.  He enjoys playing whether he wins or loses.  I, on the other hand, have an innate desire —no, need, to win.  Playing with him made me know I wanted to really be in the game.  However, it took a LOT for me to muster my courage and go try to enter tennis courts where women were hypercompetitive, had already formed their own cliques, and knew how to play.  I do not like doing things if I cannot do them well.  I didn’t want to wear the white pleated short tennis skirt and I began to get cold feet trying to play at 48.  Armed with my “newest” racket, I was good-naturedly laughed at.  The tennis rackets now are like AIR compared with my old one!  And my original wooden one is like trying to hit with a brick.  I think I have settled on a racket I like and I have learned that several factors go into choosing one:  grip, size, weight, strings, how one hits, etc.  So I have started really learning tennis and I could not be happier.  Helen Wills Moody, an American tennis player, has been said to be arguably the most dominant tennis player of the 20th century as well as the greatest female player in history.  Ranked number one in singles in 1927, she won the Grand Slam Singles at French Open in 1928, 1929, 1930 and 1932.  She won the Grand Slam at Wimbledon in 1927, 1928, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1933, 1935, and 1938.  In the US Open, she won the the Grand Slam singles in 1923, 1924, 1925, 1927,1928, 1929, and 1931.  She was ranked highest in Doubles in 1924 and won Grand Slam Mixed Doubles in the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open as well.  Representing the United States, she medaled gold in Singles and Doubles at the 1924 games in Paris.  Moody said, “I love the feel of hitting the ball hard, the pleasure of a rally.  It is these things that make tennis the delightful game that it is.”  I could not agree more.  “Love” may mean “zero” in the game, but I have discovered a love “match” with tennis:  it is a no contest.

My mother loved taking pictures.  Thanks to her I have a wonderful pictorial timeline of my life growing up.  It is interesting to watch the evolution of people in photography — from those first formal black and white portraits with families posing stiffly to the more casual color photos we see today.  Thanks to my iPhone, I always have my camera with me, and I am able to capture completely candid moments like this.  We were waiting at the dentist’s office and my little girl struck up a conversation with another little girl near her age in the artless way that children do.  I listened to them talk for awhile, comparing where they were in school to the number of teeth they’d lost.  I glanced up at one point and saw this.  Both little girls were examining an almost life sized bronze of a little girl about their age who was reading a book.  Something about it struck me, and I was able to get the shot before the minute passed.  Life is made up of moments big and small.  In the past it was important to have the big ones photographed for posterity.  Now we have the luxury of photographing the little ones, and they can be just as meaningful.  Unlike a painting, subject to the interpretation of the artist, the lens does not lie.  The American photographer and photojournalist Dorothea Lange once said, “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”  She was best known for her work which humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography.  Although my degree is in journalism I consider myself a photojournalist as well, following in the footsteps of my mother as both a writer and a photographer.  Life will not always be perfect or go the way we’d planned.  How we choose to view the blessings we have been given in this life, however, can always make it picture perfect.

A couple of weeks ago we went to an American Girl doll luncheon.  This was outside the official realm of the American Girl doll store and restaurant.  I have always loved plush animals of any sort but just never got into dolls; it didn’t matter if they were baby dolls, young girl dolls, or Barbie dolls.  So when my mother-in-law suggested getting my daughter her own American Girl doll for Christmas I had no idea how it would go over.  Like me, my child is in love with all types of animals.  However, she seems to be more feminine than I was and I must confess I like seeing her in dresses … which I REFUSED to wear unless it was the first day of school or for church.  My mother-in-law and I both studied the dolls at length and tried to get the one that most resembled my child.  It has my daughter’s deep, dark brown eyes and auburnish hair, although it is straight and its skin is darker.  Right before Christmas I was happy to be at the American Girl doll store where I had lunch with my grandmother-in-law and my mother-in-law, along with my daughter.  We had four generations there plus the doll, whom my child named Paris.  I could not believe all the things they sold:  high chairs, travel packs, clothes, accessories, furniture, animal companions, jewelry, and so much more.  The most jaw-dropping thing for me was the hair salon.  They had actual people braiding, straightening, curling, and cutting the dolls’ hair; of course it was by appointment.  Her grandmother bought Paris got her own special chair (which acts like a child’s high chair that attaches onto the sides of tables.)  For dining there her doll received her own miniature gift bag containing a plate, cloth napkin, cardboard table setting, and (my personal favorite) a glass of sparkling pink lemonade in a goblet.  Paris had already scored a tiny cell phone complete with an American Girl Doll “credit card,” a library card, and five very realistic looking dollars.  In addition, the cell phone has a screen that can be manually changed from weather to games or calls.  I was surprised to see a little boy eating there with his doll.  He had straight blonde hair in a cut indicative of the ’70s, as did his doll.  I covertly watched him love and nurture him and thought, wow, someone is going to be very lucky to have him as a father one day.  F.H. Bradley, the British idealist philosopher, once said, “We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother.  It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings.”  I would disagree.  Motherhood is very real.  It is sobering, shocking, and straining, but — in my opinion — it is also life’s greatest joy.  It is not without pain, hardship, sacrifice, doubt, and worry.  When I see my baby doll buckle her doll in the car before herself I know she will be an incredibly loving mother.  Maybe Bradley was right; I really do love playing with my very own American Girl Doll.

Recently a ten year picture challenge has been going around Facebook.  One is supposed to post a pic of how they looked a decade ago compared with today.  I just happened to take this picture of my little one recently and then a few days later I came across this old picture of my mother, taken by my father.  There are thirty years and two generations separating these two but I think the resemblance is striking.  My mother had redder hair but my daughter has her fair complexion.  I see brown eyes in both; my child’s being darker because she has her father’s deep, chocolate eyes.  The cheeks, pert nose, and cupid’s bow lips are all my mother’s.  Moreover, she has my mother’s firecracker yet sweet personality.  She says the EXACT SAME things my mother said, and in the same way.  While some may not find this surprising, my mother passed right after her third birthday.  I was extremely close with both of my parents for all of my life until the day they died.  I was 28 when my father passed and I took care of my mother until she passed at the age of 81.  To have lost one’s parents and truly see them in your child is perhaps the greatest gift imaginable.  From the sweep of her long, jet black eyelashes identical to my father’s, to the same obsession with rolls my mother had, she is absolutely their grandchild.  I know my husband’s side is there, too but since they are still living she receives the benefit of knowing them.  I can only provide glimpses of what my beloved parents were like through memories, stories, and pictures.  I cannot presume to suppose what adopted children and orphans may feel; I can only express what a deep sense of genetic familial connection I have always had.  I want that for my daughter.  Every time I see or hear my folks inexplicably in my child my heart is both elated and saddened.  Of course I am elated to know they live on and I am saddened because they no longer walk this earth.  The American educator and wife of the 37th President of the United States, Pat Nixon, once said, ”All lives have triumphs and tragedies, laughter and tears, and mine has been no different.  What really matters is whether, after all of that, you remain strong and a comfort to your loved ones.  I have tried to meet that test.”  I hope I am remaining strong and a comfort as well … for my mother’s namesake. 

Thinking back on it, I am rather surprised this is the third post I have written about laundry.  It is my least favorite chore and I am always looking for ways to make it lighter.  Ha!  No pun intended.  I suppose one reason I detest it is because a lot of Saturdays as a kid were spent with my parents at an unair-conditioned laundromat.  The heat emanating from inside the glassed-in rectangular building was brutal, and I was always embarrassed because everyone could see all of our unmentionables.  First there was the challenge of trying to get several washers together, followed by the shoving/sliding in of two quarters per machine to start them.  We could not leave for fear of people stealing our clothes or tumping them out to get the machines which were always in demand.  Then came the transfer of laundry into tiny metal carts for which people also vied.  They had bars across the top for hanging things before and/or after loading them all into the dryers.  Perpetually spinning along the back wall,  they were a sea of blurred color as laundry of all sorts was dried.  Leading up to that point took at least an hour.  Afterward came the interminable wait for everything to dry.  I remember helping Daddy fold bed sheets even though I was too little to keep my side from dragging the ground.  Last, there was the dreaded steamer, which I despised most of all.  My mother would turn so red from the intense heat and sometimes get singed from the scalding water that ran down the improperly wrapped coiled pipe.  I realize in many parts of the world people still do not even have this type of luxury.  And to have one’s own washer and dryer right in their house is a blessing I place tantamount to having a working toilet.  I guess the feelings have never really left me and I have absolutely no reason to hate laundry as I once did.  But I do love anything in the likeness of animals.  We have two little plastic hedgehogs in our dryer named Spike and Tumbleweed which serve as static cling removers.  I have always wanted these elephant baskets and finally came across them, so I got one to hold lights, Ellie, and her brother, Babar, to hold darks.  Now at least our stuff is presorted and the bins are so darn cute the hubs and my little one don’t seem to mind using them.  I am hoping they will be cheery additions to our home that are not only functional but also fun.  Before I bought them, I checked that they were made from sustainable material.  The British travel writer and conservationist Mark Shand once wrote, “The elephants can survive only if forests survive.”  We do not need anymore concrete jungles, and we all should be looking at our world through the lens of protecting and preserving wild animals and the wild places they must have in which to live.  It is a heavy load to fight for wildlife, who have no voice other than our own, but having them reminds me of our blessings and our responsibilities.  As they are helping me, I am doing my part to help them:  no elephant rides; no circuses with their feet bound in chains; signing every petition against the illegal ivory trade, and supporting a worldwide permanent ban on the hunting and trapping of these gentle giants.  They say an elephant never forgets, and I do not want them becoming just another memory.