Brother Wilfred must have been in his eighties when he coached the tennis team at San Joaquin Memorial High School – this was back in 1982. I don’t remember him ever hitting a ball with us, but he always had his racquet with him and would demonstrate smooth effective strokes, without the constraints of a ball. He’d repeat a stroke five or six times and say: “Now, go andpractice this in the privacy of your boudoir.”
(This boudoir seems perfect for practicing – with the ball.)
This particular suggestion only made sense in the larger context of Catholic high school with its concern to curb and sublimate the adolescent sex-drive. I never tried perfecting my forehand and backhand in my bedroom, let alone my serve; might I have missed out?
On the job, Brother Wilfred outfitted himself in short-sleeved shirts and tennis shorts that stopped just above of the knee. In my memory he wore a baseball cap but maybe it was a bucket hat or a visor – peu importe. He had the rounded, turtle back of the elderly and an arthritic limp but his passion kept his spirit young. Strangely, what I remember most clearly about him were his stiff, swollen knees. They reminded me of cabbages yet they seemed as breakable as clay. Age deforms the body in a mysterious act of creation: I watched his wide, round knees with troubled admiration, fearing the day they finally failed him, he would fall harder than most.
A few weeks ago I came upon this typed note from him in a box of old letters.
I don’t remember winning. Nor do I remember losing
. He’s absolutely right about the serve though; I never have been able to toss the ball properly. But what’s this about learning to lob? Moreover, why the queenly “Let’s”? It seems to have annoyed Brother Wilfred that I did a lousy lob. I was a fairly decent tennis player but not a good one; I’ve since learned that people who are left eyed and right handed as I am, rarely are. Brother Wilfred perhaps read more into my abilities than he should have; he sat down at his typewriter and plucked out this letter of stern encouragement motivated by a pedagogical belief that it would incite me to improve. It didn’t. At least not in the way he expected.
The lob gives an out-of-position player time to recover and prepare for the next ball. It is a delaying technique that requires precision to be effective: if the ball is not high enough it gets smashed by the opponent; if it’s given too much push it lands out of court, etc. For the tennis audience, the ball projected high in the air creates a moment of breath-holding suspense.
The lob interests me in as much as it shares a strategy with narrative. One of story-telling’s multiple functions is to stave off danger, the most obvious example of this being the conceit of The Arabian Nights. Shahrazad keeps the Sultan from murdering her by stringing him along with her entertaining stories. She was a master of the narrative lob. Yet even when there’s no immediate danger in sight, a story-teller might want to disrupt the neat, narrative arc that takes us from beginning to end and shift the reader’s attention toward “what is” rather than “what’s next?” By keeping us in an expanded present, the storyteller has found a way of mastering Time, which we all know will run out on us one day.
There was fashion in novelistic writing in the 18th century to lob en continu; the foremost of these literary lobbers was Laurence Sterne who deployed his radical method in The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy. Denis Diderot joined in on the other side of the English channel with Jacques le Fataliste et son maître. Both novels digress rather than progress; any advancement the story seems to make is swiftly foiled by a divagation, which is, in turn, rerouted by another aside, ad infinitum. The novels are confounding, outrageous, amusing, relentless works and both rely on lobs that, I suppose, are never allowed to land. For the fun to go on, the ball must stay in the air: defying gravity, after all, is the imagination’s most impressive power.
In writing my novel The Baby of Belleville I wanted to pay tribute to Sterne; admittedly I lobbed far above and beyond what current, literary taste deems safe and decent, but I did allow the ball to land, softly, from time to time. A review of the book mentioned it had “a plot of sorts.” Yes, I provided an intrigue with a bit of Mafia stuff going on; yet I invite my readers to enjoy those connections made in the air, while the lob arcs. I do believe that it’s in this interval that the real story gets told, or at least the one I most want to tell.
I am grateful to Brother Wilfred. He could have simply retired; at his age he certainly deserved the leisure. Instead he coached an unruly group of high school students and took us seriously enough to write us notes evaluating our game. If I tucked away his letter in a safe spot, where it has remained for the past thirty years, it was because I valued it.
Thank you, Brother Wilfred, for learning me the lob.