dropped the ball

I had a boyfriend once who was devoted to basketball. He wasn't tall enough to play varsity, but he played intramural on every team that would have him. He played pickup with friends. He got up at 6:30 to coach kids. Rumour has it that he could sink a ball from anywhere on the court. I didn't know enough about basketball at the time to know that was a skill. He was under the much-mistaken impression that I was going to play too. Since the young age when I discovered I couldn't catch a ball, I had no interest in playing games that involved balls. You might wonder that we got so far into a relationship without him realizing that. When we started going out he had a sprained ankle, so I didn't know he was athletic. I had no sprained ankle though. He should have figured out I didn't care about team sports. But we were still in the heyday of our romance, and finally he convinced me to put on shorts and join him on the gym floor. He told me who was on our team which I immediately forgot. He said the goal was to throw the ball in the basket. But oh, you couldn't just grab the ball and run. You had to dribble it. (Seriously, what a dumb word to use in a sport. Dribbling is what a leaky faucet does.) If I couldn't catch a ball, I certainly couldn't dribble it. Shortly into the game, I was asked to leave the court. Afterward he told me I'd embarrassed him. I'd embarrassed him?

This past summer I dropped the ball on blogging. Not because I was lazing around on a dock trailing my feet in the water and reading detective fiction. I've been home for the most part. My own wee personal life has been fine, but too many of my friends have been going through the emotional equivalents of earthquakes. I mean earthquakes on a scale that would make San Francisco a memory. Given which, I didn't feel like writing about some lighthearted topic. The tomatoes growing in my garden, cycling, Spanish grammar, making pesto...

Slowly I'll get back to it. Good things are happening too. Friends about to have babies. Friends with new books coming out.