Last round robin and a question

Back to Times font. Is this different than yesterday? The blog tells me it has uploaded an image, but where has it gone?

Kay tells me that Paul (Elvis)'s sister is visiting, but I haven't seen her. I haven't seen much of "Elvis" either. His car is parked next to ours. Perhaps I'll get a chance to talk with his sister before she leaves.

Last Round robin this a.m. Nothing much to say about it, except I do feel I may have peaked too early. My play was passable (get the pun). Today I had some trouble with overheads while looking directly into the sun. Duh. I didn't feel and play my best. Hopefully I will feel and play my best the next three days. Rain is predicted, Big Time for Friday. Perhaps we'll find out tonight what Plan B is.

Tonight is the cocktail party. We bring our own booze and hors de orderves, as Diane named her cat, Hors for short. We chat a little then we find out which team we play on. Rules are mentioned. Will they ever mention Foot Faults? A couple of the men literally step into the court before they hit the ball. No Fair. Of course Foot Faults will not be mentioned nor will the linespeople call them. There is no Referee.

Most of the lines people are tennis players, currently or within the last 5-10 years. Not all can hear or see that well. There is the problem of memory and some do get distracted and not watch the play. So, anything can and often does happen on the court or in a game. If I remember correctly we play eight games, no adds. sudden death at 40/40. We have team names, colors and numbers so the spectators can follow the play. Servers are supposed to call out the score before each serve, but my recollection is that often doesn't happen. It then becomes the linesperson's task to tell the players the score, but often they don't know the score. The spectators aren't allowed to make calls or suggest scores, but that rule is sometimes broken.

Each player plays two to three eight game matches each day. The schedule is posted. The people in charge of the tournament try to keep the play on time. Cookies and drinks are available, water too. Lots of spectators. Well, 20-30 I'd guess at any one time. Official photographs are taken before the game of each team before and in a winning stance, just in case. Lois takes photos while we play. She is so unobtrusive I hardly ever notice her on the court. At the awards dinner she usually presents each player with photos she has taken during the tournament and a photo of the team and the group shot. I've acquired quite a few of these photos over the years. What to do with them?

My question is: Why are the Women expected to bring the hors d' orderves? Why not the men?

From an early age, before the age of 9, I knew that growing up to be a woman and getting married was a bad deal. I watched my mother. She cooked, she cleaned. She worked in the Post Office alongside my Father in the Summer. She worked in the diner as a waitress when my father owned The Captain's Table. After she came home from work, she didn't get to sit down like my father did when he came home. She was busy in the kitchen cooking dinner. Something I don't think she enjoyed very much.

Why would I want to grow up to be a woman? I thought the men had much more fun. They got to go hunting. They had dogs, made decisions. They didn't do the dishes or cook meals or clean the house. They got to listen to the radio and read the paper. My mother read the paper around 10 or 11 p.m., just before going to bed so she could get up around 5 a.m. to bake a cake for the church or whatever else she was expected to do.

Does that sound like a lot of fun? No. The only thing I liked to do as a young girl was cut the crusts off the sandwiches and cut the sandwiches neatly into four pieces for the Stamp Club meetings. My father presided over that. My mother served the food. Her life as a wife and mother resembled the life of a maid. Not that I knew what a maid did. We did not have a maid. But I read books, went to the movies. I saw what maids did. They were quiet, stayed out of conversation. They cooked and cleaned.. They were poorly paid and mostly under appreciated. Taken for granted, really. They were expected to keep the house spotless, serve the food hot, etc. Exactly what was expected of my mother and more. She had to deal with me too.

As a child my father, I was told, thought the world of me. He took me up in a plane at 5. Created the best birthday party a 5 year old could have with movies. He bought me a jeep I could drive around when I was four or five. I had to pedal it, but it was great. I got to play with the indoor dogs and the outdoor, hunting dogs. When I was 8 or so he put a basketball hoop up on the side of the double swing set out in the yard. I couldn't go hunting with the men though. Ask as I did. I had to stay home with my mother.

My father and mother played the piano by ear. I wanted to learn, but nobody wanted to teach me. After years of asking, after my father died, I finally got to take piano lessons. I learned to read music. I loved to practice, but I was never able to "play by ear." I yearned to ride a horse.

My mother scrimped and saved from her salary and I was able to take $10 each Saturday to go riding up at Alice Churchill's on county road. If mother only knew what went on there, but that's another story.

After my father died when i was 10 we lost everything. Lost the "big house" on the North Bluff. It wasn't a big house, but it was a big house to me when we had to move out and live in a tiny house at the bottom of the street, right on the harbor. I got to look up the hill every day and see the house I loved being lived in by someone else. I also lost my jeep and all my toys. My mother, with an 8th grade education, but being a good waitress, had supported my half-brother and sister when her first husband died in the 30's, during the Depression.

Now in 1953 she was widowed again. This time with a 10 year old. She went back to high school, much to my embarassment. I walked home from school as she walked up to school. When I was 10 it made me ashamed rather than proud. She got her diploma, studied book keeping and got a job keeping the books for The Locker Plant. The place in Edgartown that first supplied the Vineyard with frozen food, long before the big refrigerator trucks came to the Vineyard as frequently as they do now.

There at the Locker Plant she met her third husband, Wallace Darnley,or Wally, who became my step-father. Wally knew nothing about children. Had none of his own. His first wife, I was told, was a "religious fanatic." I think she was Jehovah's Witness. She had died, I guess. Wally was a strict Methodist. No cards or dancing on Sunday type of guy. Had to go to church on Sunday, respect your elders, etc.

My mother and Wally were married around Christmas time in the Methodist parsonage on New York Ave. in December of 1954. After they married we all moved to Edgartown where my mother was born and Wally had moved in 1928. We rented a house, a former grain shed on Katama Road, from Rudy Vincent. The Wagamans own it now.

Wally grew up in New Bedford, roomed with Johnny Weismuller, Tarzan, at some point in his early life. He had great stories about prohibition and driving Model A Fords. Gangsters smuggling in booze by boat. Wish I'd taped those stories. He didn't tell them very often though.

Wally delivered frozen food and eventually delivered the newspapers to local distributors. He picked them up from the Island Queen site in his truck. He also worked as an auxilliary policeman in the evenings.It was on one of those evenings that he caught me at a loud party one summer. The police came to clear everyone out of the house because the neighbors must have complained about the noise. I was among the kids who exited the house. He was outraged. We didn't really see eye to eye.

I was very rebellious and very sad after the death of my father. Wally was a bust as a step=father, I thought. He seemed clueless about me. He did make an attempt once to befriend me by buying me a bow and arrow and target which I tried to warm up to in the back yard. I did use it some, but I wasn't really all that interested. He bought it. Went out with me once and I was on my own.

One great thing he did do. He allowed me to shoot his 38 revolver out in the back yard at some target. I was used to shooting my 22 rifle and I had my father's L.C. Smith 16 gauge shot gun. At 14 I took the course at school. Allouise and I and the boys were taught proper handling of firearms by Banny. What's his name Bannister, the game warden who taught the firearm safety course each Fall.

If my father, now dead, and my brother, living in Oak Bluffs wouldn't let me go hunting with them I decided I'd go hunting myself. Allouise Waller was interested in hunting too. She had a lot of brothers and a couple of sisters. We were in the same class in high school. It was 1957, I was 14. I was in the 10th grade. Allousie and I would take our guns, our buck shot and try to shoot quail. When you shot into a covey they would call to each other to regroup. I never hit one that I know of, Thank goodness.

My brother was 28 or so, married and hunted with his buddies. They wouldn't take me along. So, I went deer hunting by myself. I drove up to Indian Hill was it or Lambert's cove? Up-island somewhere. I got out of the car loaded my shot gun with slugs. You couldn't use buck shot on deer and no rifles allowed. I knew the rules, but I did something foolish that saved me in the long run.

As I was walking along a dirt road a deer jumped out quite a ways in front of me. I'm sure it is illegal to shoot in close proximity to a road, just like it is illegal to shoot so many feet near someone's house, but being 14, alone and wanting to prove myself, I put the shot gun to my shoulder aimed at the deer, not wanting to hit it in the head, I probably aimed for it's chest. I didn't want to ruin the venison either. I pulled the trigger. The deer bolted safely away into the woods. I was horrified at what I had done. Luckily I missed the deer, but more luckily I hadn't killed any person in the vicinity who might be coming down the dirt road.

No one came down the road any time after that, but that ended my deer hunting days. Much the same way my hunting was forever ended by events in Edgartown. Allouise and I would go out with our guns and prowl around the fields looking for rabbits or pheasant. One day we were in thick brush. Something one doesn't see much of anymore do to over-browsing by the deer. We were in think brush. Allouise was in front of me. She had a wonderful sick sense of humor as I did at the time. Suddenly she turned around, clicked off the safety and said, "Well, there isn't much to shoot at, is there?" or something like that. We both laughed. She lowered the gun. I was taken aback because I realized that if she faltered or stumbled I would be simply dead. However, she didn't falter or stumble. She put the safety back on and we called it a day for hunting. We couldn't have shot anything in that brush if we had seen something. A dull day hunting.

Often I would go out with a couple of "nerdy" would be the term people would use today, friends who would take me hunting with them. Graham Willoughby, a kid whose name escapes me at the moment and David Marchant. None of whom would I want to be seen with on the dance floor, but if they were willing to take me duck hunting with them I was willing to go. We spent many mornings sitting in the cold, waiting for the sun to come up as the decoys bobbed on the water and we waited for the ducks to fly in.

I do not remember ever firing a shot, nor did they. We, Graham and I or three of us or four of us would go down to Edgartown great pond armed with a thermos of black coffee, sit, couldn't talk, we might scare the ducks. Wait for dawn, a little longer. Then we would pack up and go home. I don't remember one conversation. Never got a duck, but my mother always handed me the thermos as I left. I felt almost as cool as my brother as i left the house with my gun, my hunting buddies, but I knew I wasn't. Bill shot a deer every year and lots of ducks and rabbits, pheasant, etc. Luckily he gave some to us from time to time.

My hunting ended the day I was standing in a field out at Katama. I flushed a beautiful cock pheasant. As it flew up into the sun I aimed my shotgun a little ahead of the bird as you do with skeet, leading the bird so my shot would hit it. But the beauty of the bird's feathers mesmerized me. I had taken the safety off, I was ready to shoot. But I couldn't shoot and kill anything that beautiful. I never went hunting again after than experience. I think that experience turned me into a bird watcher. That and my father taking me to a Crow's convention up in Deep Bottom when I was about 7.

So who in their right mind would want to grow up to be a woman? A woman isn't something I had a choice about. However, I knew from an early age I did not want to grow up to be a wife and mother. Too much like being a maid, a poorly paid maid and not very much fun. Men had the most fun in life. I could tell that before the age of 10. After the age of 10 I knew it was a certainty.

Gotta go. I'm supposed to bring hors d' orderves to this cocktail party tonight and I wouldn't want to disappoint anyone. I'm going to get some roast beef and horseradish and maybe some dark rye. Might just as well please the men. Hopefully the women will please themselves.

FAN