Today’s wins include waking up at 5 am, no alarm needed, rarin’ to go play tennis with my friend Steve. Made coffee without waking up my wife (she was up already, getting ahead in French on Duolingo). Made the 33 bus before sunrise east on Venice to the 217 north at the big power station on Fairfax — still before the dawn. Feeling Purposeful on the bus, going somewhere Important, ’cause I am, Steve is my new friend and making new friends is IMPORTANT all the time and when you’re a retired 62-year-old guy like me, it’s really important.

So that’s a bunch of wins. I jotted down all kinds of significado in my little notebook on the bus, let me just check for ya to see if any of them still resonate here in my rehydrating and eating the left-over banana phase of the adventure, having returned home safe & sound (another win).

Well, this note here actually does still ring true: that it’s comforting to be in the middle of a long adventure with no definite end in sight, again at the age of 62, not to over-harp on that, but yeah. We are nearing the half-way point, not of living to 114, which, no one expects that. I have banana trees in my backyard. I see what happens to the leaves. Light green, dark green, yellow, brown. I get it. Banana leaf life cycle notwithstanding, it does give me pep in my step to have just notched Court # 116.

I knocked out a couple with no blog posts but had a giddy-good time or close enough at Manhattan Heights Playground, South El Monte Community Center, Paradise Park in Torrance, and Lincoln Park in East LA — thank you to all the Parks & Rec folk who keep every court I’ve ever been to in LA at a minimum of basically playable. This current tally of 116 is out of a total of 240, not counting high school courts, which you could count if you wanted, but a) that would be too many (512) and also b) let’s hear it for people who aren’t students or staff or family keeping the heck away from schools.

OK so now you are as familiar as I am with every fold of my cranium, so I can report to you on the actual tennis.

Not good!

Not good for Marko, unless you count running around having fun, laughing and exerting and feeling like your true self. Steve is a fine fellow to play tennis with. Did I mention he is 30 years younger than I am and not that far removed from four years of service in the Marines. Yeah! So dang right I feel peppy hanging with him even if today’s outing was a bit of a trouncing. Things Steve did right include getting virtually every shot back and not laughing too hard or really commenting at all beyond the occasional grinning “What was that?” on my more grotesque mis-hits. I analyzed the problem with my game as involving the ball going too long, except when it was going too short. Fortunately nobody cares about post-game analysis of rec tennis, what anyone did wrong is the absolute last thing anyone wants to hear, so we can just move on.