July 11, 2011

I played a lot of games and sports with my Dad growing up. He coached some of my sports teams as well as my tennis (I was a tennis prodigy/brat) and was always willing and happy to pitch to me or play with me when he got home from work or on weekends. However, to this day the MOST FUN game I can EVER remember playing with him, at least based on how much fun I had at the time, was this incredibly simple game we played probably only once. We were at my grandmother’s apartment in NYC, in the living room. Before I go any further, yes, the game DID involve a ball, and yes, since my grandmother was like most Jewish grandmothers, the idea of us playing ball in the house was probably so frightening and inappropriate to her that I’m amazed we did it. And that she survived it. Maybe she was cooking all day and never left the kitchen.

Anyway, Dad was sitting in a chair on one side of the room, and I stood at the edge of the room by the hallway leading to the bedrooms. I don’t remember how the game started, but basically Dad threw the ball as high as the ceiling would allow, trying to get the ball over my head and into the hallway, while I tried to jump up and catch the ball or at least knock it down. I was probably 6-7 years old and probably thought I had Michael Jordan’s ability to jump and hang in the air (it seems very likely that I did), so this was a fantastic challenge. Actually, MJ was in high school at this point so let’s go with Dr. J. But I digress. The game was very fun partially because my Dad was a good athlete himself and could get the ball exactly where it needed to go to make it a good challenge for me, but mostly it worked because I happened to be JUST tall (or short) enough to be able to jump JUST high enough so that a perfect toss would beat me, and a well timed jump by me would beat him unless it was a perfect toss. 6 months earlier or 6 months later and the game would have been boring after 30 seconds. I’m pretty sure we never played it again. And yet I remember it vividly 35 or so years later.

So why do I bring this up? You know, other than because I couldn’t come up with a better blog idea today? Well, this weekend Ariel and I were in the pool and she told me to go towards the deep end and she tried to throw a pair of her goggles over my head into the deep end while I tried jumping up and grabbing them. And yes, as you probably suspected, Ariel has a cannon of an arm. Sure, the roles were a little reversed from me and Dad, and sure, my vertical leap still isn’t nearly as good as it is in my head, but it was incredibly fun. Ariel was able to throw the goggles JUST far enough that a good throw wasn’t reachable for me, and I didn’t have to “let” her win. She could win on her own as much if not more then she lost. For her part, she thought this was the funniest and most awesome game since…Candyland probably. And we all know how high a standard THAT is.