Baptist Preacher, Part Two

This is Part Two of a serial story. To read Part One, click here.

On Monday morning, the city was holding lessons where we agreed to meet, so we drove across town to Kanawha City public courts.

The competitive spirit established at the hospital continued on the court. Rob cut me no slack; he served hard, played aggressive and well. I sized him up and feigned a weak backhand to throw him off.

I had a great backhand. In fact, I was fairly evenly strong on both sides. My knees weren’t destroyed yet; I was nimble and fast. I had a decent serve and could deal either a top spin or a wicked back spin pretty much at will. At that time, at least where I played, most people did not usually execute spins.

Of course, I wore a tennis skirt. Back then, you had to have proper clothing in order to get on the court. The dress I chose that day was a buttercup yellow one-piece dress, fitted perfectly against my hourglass figure and just barely covering the bottom of my [panties]. It was sleeveless, and the straps were thick braided matching material. My skin was bronze and my hair -- down past my waist -- chestnut brown with brilliant natural new-penny-copper highlights from the hours I spent in the sun.

When you’ve played tennis for years, you learn a few different ways to retrieve balls rather than bend over a hundred times. Some people double-tap the ball with their racket, causing the ball to bounce up into the air so it can be grabbed. Some scoop the edge of the racket under the ball and flip it up. This is hard on the racket because it’s so easy to scrape it on the hard surface. There is another technique, where you use your racket to roll the ball up the outside of your ankle until it’s high enough that you can tap it with your racket, causing the ball to bounce up to waist level where you can easily grab it.

But if you’re a girl and you want to be really mean, you position yourself in such a way that you bend from the waist, keeping your legs very straight. You angle yourself just so, and retrieve the ball just fast enough that your skirt flips just a bit, revealing snow-white panties against tan thighs for just a split second. Then you turn and make eye contact with your opponent, hold that eye contact, and tuck the ball up under the side of your skirt inside the elastic of your panties (if you don’t have pockets – which I didn’t).

Psychological warfare? Why not? Males are considerably stronger than females – it’s only prudent to make the playing field as level as possible.

I could see that I had accomplished what I set out to do. Rob was a red-blooded twenty-something male. It was time for the sandbagging to end.

[Tomorrow: Part Three]

The Baptist Preacher, Part One

A Baptist preacher fell in love with me when I was nineteen, and carries a torch for me to this day.~~GH

I worked on 3-North at Charleston Memorial Hospital. That unit was practically intensive care; it was Dr. James Walker’s personal floor. Thirty-two beds – four beds in each ward, eight wards on the unit compromised 3-North. Dr. Walker had his own rules, one of which was no visiting hours except Sunday afternoons from 1-8:30 p.m.

Since our patients were very ill, many if not all of them were on respirators or ventilators, you can imagine the influx of visitors on Sundays. There was no limit to how many visitors a patient could have, either, so it wasn’t unusual for four to six visitors to crowd around each bed. Four patients per room, plus let’s call it an average of five people per bed – that’s twenty-four people crammed into a fairly small space.

With twenty-four-plus human beings talking in various tones, a variety of whoosh-making breathing equipment, electronic IV machines tick-tick-ticking, and the general ambient noise of that many people moving about bumping into things, the rooms were quite chaotic. So when this bigger-than-life barrel-chested six-four guy shows up in tennis whites carrying a racquet and begins practically shouting out greetings, you can understand that I was not amused as I attempted to listen to a patient’s breath sounds with my stethoscope.

I asked him to kindly tone it down a bit, and I didn’t catch what he said, but whatever it was caused a ripple of titters in the crowd around the patient he was visiting. He seemed arrogant and something about his attitude challenged something in me. I continued checking my patients’ vital signs and inspecting their equipment to make sure everything operated properly. This big tennis guy kept making jokes and regaling his audience with stories about the game he’d just come from. I had played competitive tennis since I was seven years old, and his boasts got under my skin. I became more and more annoyed just listening to him.

He had an unusual oratory style; the people seemed to hang on his every word. I found that interesting, if irritating. At the time, I’d never been in a Baptist or other fundamentalist church. I had been raised Presbyterian and our services were low key and understated.

Eventually, I got my chance to pipe up. He made some comment about skinning both his elbows playing tennis.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

He answered me.

I murmured something unintelligible under my breath, nodded my head, then turned away and busied myself with my patient.

He took the bait. “Why did you want to know where I’m from?”

I turned back, paused a beat, and said, “Because where I’m from, we don’t play tennis on our elbows.”

Twenty-some people burst out laughing. A few even hooted and jeered. The big tennis man’s face turned crimson, his ears practically glowed they were so red.

And so it began.

[Tomorrow: Part 2]