a racket to the face

Next up in my reminisces of summers past – walking to the Lucas County Rec Center handball courts with my sister and our friends to play racquetball. By playing racquetball, of course, I mean aimlessly horsing around with my parent’s equipment until we got bored/hurt.  I would develop not only my ball-hitting skills, but also nasty sunburns since the courts were outside and the sun shone pretty much straight down onto them.

My racquetball-hitting days came to a screeching halt the day we went over to play and I walked face-first into my sister’s back-swing by mistake.  To this day, I just remember the sound the racket made as it cut a rapid path through the air back toward my face, then literally seeing stars and wandering home in a daze.  I don’t know how I did not lose a tooth.  One side of my mouth swelled up to enormous proportions and for days after, all my friends said that I looked like the Elephant Man.

Twenty-five plus years later, the courts are still there, though they look like they’re starting to crumble.  In this picture, the part of the girl with racket is being played by my daughter, and the racket she is holding is one of the very ones we used to play with – my parents gave them to me years ago after they gave up the sport.