Most guys my age fear growing older. Me, I fear growing younger! And I don't mean as in a second childhood kind of Alzheimer senility! I mean I'm actually aging backwards! I am unlike a lot of my buddies who slip unconcernedly into the dimming days of senior life. Nowhere is my claim of returning youthfulness more evident than on the tennis court where I play three times a week. Once I step on that green rectangle separated by a net, years of accumulated aches, pains, muscle sores, tendon strains,bone cracking, sore, flat feet, and all those other disabilities every athlete inherits just disappear! I begin playing as I did when I was at the height of my talent in my 40's. Once that first hard serve comes in my direction, an adrenalin-powered youth elixir pours through my body. If the serve is hit on a wide angle, my body, like an arrow, shoots towards the area where I must meet the ball, my rejuvenated feet churn like machinery under me, and my racket hand, no longer arthritic-stiff, stretches confidently out to meet the ball! And the ball, as if in slow motion, seems twice as normal, and my usually glaucoma-weakened eyes sees the ball clearly enough to read the brand name, and every hairy surface of the ball is visible to my heightened eyesight giving me enough time to pick out the exact spot on the ball I want to hit! My return bullets past a stunned net man and doesn't touch down until it reaches the farthest unreturnable spot on the court! Game...set...and match! "So," you ask, "why do you complain about growing younger when you can play the same soft lob, easy return, or slice-slice game that many of us are happy playing?" "I'm not complaining. I just know that there will come a point someday where I have pushed youth so far past human boundaries, that it will have no other path but to snap back hard against my real age! I do not look forward to that day! That's why I fear growing younger!"
