Adam and Me

I've lived in Maryland a long time. I'm approaching 20 years of living in Maryland, which is pretty much longer than anywhere else I've lived in.

Occasionally, I'm reminded of this. I met up with Adam for dinner. Adam lives out in Virginia and has a toddler, so I don't get to see him all that often, though we've met up a little more often in the last year or two than in the several years before that.

Back in the day, we used to play tennis. I had my trusty Rossignol F-250, a variant of the F-200, which Wilander used to use. This had an inverted bridge. I suppose that was a novelty, but seeing as no other company imitated it, it must not have been all that great an idea (as opposed to oversized racquets, ultra-wide racquets, and ultra-long racquets, which were widely imitated).

That racquet gave way to the awful Donnay (Agassi himself only briefly used it, though he did win Wimbledon with it), then the Dunlop Quake (the only racquet I bought lacking a pro endorser, but the only one I playtested for real and liked), which gave way more recently to the Babolat racquet that Andy Roddick uses, and then to the Yonex racquet Nalbandian uses.

Adam was probably a better player than me. Certainly, he had a much nicer backhand than I did. Neither of us served particularly well. I would topspin high shots and wait for Adam to get impatient, which he sometimes did. We both realized playing in the wind sucks.

Our other big common interest besides tennis was Star Trek. He was more of a fan of the original series, and I leaned a little more to TNG (the next generation), though I'm not as passionate about Star Trek as I once was. We appreciated GalaxyQuest which made fun mostly of Star Trek with Tim Allen doing his best William Shatner.

We met around 10 years ago or so, when I was teaching a FORTRAN class, which should have been easy for Adam, given that it was for non-majors, but oh well. I'd say that was 1995, I think. So more than 10 years ago, and thus, I'd only been in Maryland 5 years.

Since I didn't push playing sports a lot, I think I'm about as fast as I was, though I've never timed myself. Perhaps the weakest part of my tennis game is my serve. I don't play at all regularly. I manage to play maybe 2-3 times a year, which is kind of awful. On the other hand, my table tennis game is pretty good these days since I play several times a week.

Adam's always struck me as a pretty even keel fellow. He never seemed to get too excited nor too down, but maybe he hid it better, or I just wasn't paying attention so well. Adam's a pretty bookish fellow, both reading and writing. Sometimes I feel I should read more than I do. Blogging isn't quite the same, though I like the act of writing, even as I lack some talent. I'd love to have someone critique my writing a lot so that I could get better at it, but I suppose that's hard to find.

Hmm, this had made me think of an idea. What if there was a website that people could submit writing. Short stuff. 1-5 pages max. Others could come and critique the writing suggesting how to make the writing better. It seems kinda trivial, something you could get by taking an English class. Perhaps no one would really want to read it and edit it for you. Even so, everyone of us could stand to have better writing, right?

I suppose that's the other thing I think about when I think of Adam. Here was a guy who liked to write. It would have been cool if Adam could have made a living out of writing. True, this is really, really tough, but it would be cool to say I knew someone who wrote a novel or a short story.

Well, there's always tennis!