Who's serve?

(c) 2010 by Steve Martaindale
Table tennis, what we’ve always called pingpong, has been around more than a hundred years and has woven its way throughout my life.

My dad was a firefighter when I was young and they always had a pingpong table set up in the fire station. That’s when I first learned to play.

Through high school, I’d play occasionally with friends, but it was college that really opened pingpong possibilities. It was there I first encountered players from Asia who had a funny grip on their paddles and made the ball do some wicked stuff.

Playing opportunities diminished in early adulthood. I remember one friend who had a table for a while. Over the years, Leah and I found a game here and there.

Leah’s not really the sporting type, but she enjoyed pingpong. She wasn’t much good, but we still played when we could and she kept working on her skills.

It was when we were RV’ing some five years ago that we spent three months at a park outside Kingsville. The park catered primarily to winter visitors and we were there in the summer, meaning we were often the only people wanting to use the pingpong table.

It was free, so we couldn’t really complain much about the terrible condition of the table and we spent hours wiling away the evenings by banging a tiny ball back and forth.

That’s when Leah’s abilities really blossomed and soon the games were competitive enough that we usually received a pretty good workout darting back and forth chasing the ball.

When we bought a house in Kingsville, we really thought the living room could hold a pingpong table, but never took the plunge, which turned out to be a good thing since we were not there long.

Upon moving to central Texas, we found ourselves in a much smaller home – a fairly large, open living room with a cathedral ceiling flowing into the loft bedroom. We more than once considered a pingpong table for outdoor use, but common sense prevailed.

Last week, Leah and I engaged in an honest evaluation of our exercise regimen, or the lack thereof. We both enjoy walking, but work and chores leave little time for it. We’ve had a few exercise machines over the years, but they did not work out, either.

The bottom line is we both hate exercising on machines.

“We need something we both enjoy doing, something we like enough that we’ll make opportunities for it.”

“Hmm, there’s always pingpong.”

So, Friday evening we moved furniture, took measurements, considered all the possibilities and decided we could make a fold-up pingpong table work. We slept on the idea and, Saturday morning, were even more certain.

By Saturday afternoon, we muscled an unbelievably heavy box into the house and uncrated 211 parts. (No exaggeration; who would have thought two planks of wood could be so complicated?)

After getting up and down off the floor a couple of hundred times, I felt like I had my initial workout, yet we still managed to play for a couple of hours before going to bed. We even got in a game or two before church Sunday morning and more that night.

Yep, we decided, this is the answer.

The table goes up and down with incredible ease, plus Leah bought some of those magical glider pads to put underneath the furniture to make it easy to move.

Sure, the table looks strange standing folded up against the stairway, but we came to one insightful conclusion.

This is our house and if we’re happy having a pingpong table in the living room, then everyone else can just deal with it.

Game on.


(c) 2010 by Steve Martaindale