Ping Pong

Wow, everything old really is new again. CBS Sunday Morning had a segment on ping pong, specifically a club in NYC where ping pong is the in thing (celebrities, authors, Vanity Fair models, actors, and regular folk, see more here http://www.spinyc.com/?tag=contentMain;contentBody). If CBS Sunday Morning actually gave a link or video to their story, I'd post it too, but too soon after broadcast, I guess...

Anyway, from about 1967-1969, many nights after dinner, my dad and I would retreat to the basement where we'd battle out adolescent energy and pre-high school angst (dating myself aren't I?) at the ping pong table.

By then, my ballet shoes had been languishing in a lambswool-lined shoebox for a few years and I hadn't yet taken up a paintbrush. We would relinquish that basement to another family in 1970, when we moved from a ranch home into an apartment as my older sisters settled into adulthood and I entered high school. But, before all that, I had my introverted dad's attention and we bopped, smacked, and lobbed that ball around a large green table many a night. I loved it, and no air hockey game at Kent State in the '70s, even with a good-looking guy friend, has stayed so fondly in my memory.

And now! Skinny women in miniskirts and stilletos, tattooed rappers, a guy with a Tshirt that says "Nude ping pong." Yikes what fun from afar.

I'd be happy with cherry syrup in a Coca Cola, a bowl of pretzels, a tabletop ping pong setup, and my wonderful husband in a flannel shirt and jeans, some good music on the stereo and the pong pong pong of that bouncing ball. There's a drivethru in Nelsonville that has a sign outside "Ping Pong Balls 4/$1." Maybe it's making a comeback.