Tennis enthusiasts, don't take offense, I'm not a tennis fan. I know very little about the game over all. I know that points are scored as Love. Had I known it was that easy, I would have picked up Tennis years ago. What a boost to my delicate teen ego it would have been, even if I had scored just a little love! I wrote a story about Tennis once, wa-a-y-y back when I was in the tenth grade. The title was "Lost Love." I'll spare you the gory details. Saying that I hate the U.S. Open is like saying that I hate the Good Year blimp, or any corporate sponsored dirigible for that matter. Blimp's play a large part in my life. It may seem minuscule, but to me a blimp represents a goal, not in the sports sense however, but in the life sense.It was a summer's day in 1974 when Lisa and I had met. In truth, we had actually met several years earlier at a far younger age. Our mom's had attended High School together, managing to do what a significant amount of the general public could not...Keep in touch. Lisa's family resided roughly thirty miles east of the small hamlet I called home on a street whose name I shall never forget; Bread and Cheese Hollow Road. Imagine trying to fit all of that on the front of a small white envelope. Her address was longer than the subject matter of the letters I would stuff inside those envelopes. Had there always been some undercurrent of romance dating back to our youngest years, I wondered? It was at a church picnic where we had wasted no time getting reacquainted. Young and temporarily in love, we were glued to the waist, walking proudly through the park, our arms around each other so tightly that I can still feel the bruised ribs today. We held hands, we rode the carousel, and reveled in that special type of magic reserved only for the innocence of youth. The only other memory my addled brain, with its talent of remembering some of the most inane details had retained, was her account of a family trip to Florida and a flight in a blimp. I was jealous. We had never ventured to such far off and exotic places. I had yet to travel by air, on either a plane or a zeppelin! That special day reaching its inevitable end, we were separated once again, relegated to future communication via the postal service or the occasional phone call. Ultimately, we failed to accomplish what our parents had for so many years and eventually lost touch. She did remain in my thoughts, having often played the role of the heroine in one or two of the short stories I had crafted in my Junior High and High School years. She was not the love interest in the aforementioned tennis tale, however. That leading role was played by a girl I had met camping some years later. I'll ruin the ending by telling you that she dies in that story.
By 1985, my writing in conjunction with my brief stab at higher education had long been abandoned. I was in a great mood one warm July afternoon, cruising through life in a dead end job with no future, no game plan, and no clue. It was a happy time, similar to what a Prozac moment might feel like. Stepping out for lunch, I looked to sky above where I could hear the unmistakable droning of a large propeller driven craft. I always love the site of a blimp lazily lumbering along. The unwanted memory crashed in with the angry force of rushing water.
"I'll never do that," I thought sullenly, recalling Lisa's age-old tale of flight. "I'll never get to Florida either. What the hell am I doing? What am I going to do with my life?!"
There was nothing surreal about it. That in-body experience was a crystal clear moment of clarity, a shocking wake-up call that depressingly set the tone for the remainder of the day. Eventually I found the power within to return to my fairy tale world, though its landscape had changed somewhat. I unconvincingly told myself that life would get better one day.
It did.
Florida happened for me two years later, the curse that I had brought upon myself finally lifted. It was in the early spring of the new millennium that the unimaginable happened. Called upon by the powers that be, in a job I had turned into a career, I was asked to attend a technology trade show in Sin City. I got on the web to do a little recreational research and found myself staring at the screen in total disbelief.
Vegas.com on the launch of their new website was offering passenger's the once in a lifetime thrill to hop aboard their newly christened aerial billboard; the blimp. I had felt only the slightest degree of guilt, opting not to attend the tradeshow on the afternoon I had planned the flight. My timing could not have been any better as there were no other passengers scheduled. Due to contractual obligations, the vessel was required to be airborne regardless. My paltry fee for flight was an added bonus. It’s not a white-knuckle experience and can barely be compared to any type of extreme sport. With an arm hanging out the open side, the feeling is more like driving in a car on a newly paved road. Holding tightly to the attached ropes, a small group of people gently maneuvers the blimp, pointing it in the proper direction for takeoff. Once clear, the propellers roar and almost instantaneously the view of the horizon changes radically as we begin our steep ascent. It was an unexpectedly painful experience for me when without warning, a heavy piece of equipment fell forward, scraping and bruising my right shin. Apologizing profusely and inwardly hoping we wouldn’t be seeing me in court anytime soon, the harried pilot hastily shoved the unit back into position while I rubbed my battered bone and wondered how quickly or at what rate of speed we would be returning to earth. Apparently, the oversized electronics did not play an integral part in the function of flight. Later, in the vaunted pilot’s chair, I was instructed in the basics of operating the craft.It was the least he could do.
Two wheels positioned on each side of the chair are used for flight control. Spin them forward and the vessel descends, backward and it points skyward. The top rate of achievable speed was no more than 45 M.P.H. Returning to our proper seats he demonstrated this by bringing the engines up to full speed and aiming us at the ground, which was in no rush to come up and meet us. Heading upwards again, the speed never changed. I wondered what the people below were thinking as they watched our erratic flight pattern. I had gotten well more than my money’s worth. With no passengers waiting at the airstrip for what would have been the next scheduled departure, we stayed in the air for over an hour, veering from the normal flight path so I could see my hotel from above. The view of the famous Vegas strip from that vantage point could only have been more magical had I taken the opportunity to see it at night. A fleeting thought of Lisa must have entered my mind at one point that afternoon. While I had not thought about her in years
, she was inadvertently responsible for my being there and making it a priority to achieve a goal that I had long come to consider as insurmountable.There are a lot of blimp sightings when the Open is in town.
Why do I hate the U.S. Open?
It simply signifies the end of summer.
