When the game takes on a life of its own, we all win

Every year, I have the same conversation with the same two people.

“It’s too hot,” I say sometime around the end of June. “We should start playing at 9.”

“It’s not hot,” says Bret. “It’s just that the sun is more extreme.”

“I’m hot,” says Lisa, who is tall and perilously fair, like a Scandinavian queen. “We should start playing at 9.”

“You’re not hot,” says Bret. “You just think you’re hot.”

Every year, I stand in the spicy shade of eucalyptus trees that hover overhead like worried mothers and argue about the absolute and relative properties of sunlight and humidity and their effects on the human body. It is as familiar and irritating a seasonal conversation as the Thanksgiving dressing/stuffing debate or the your family/my family winter holiday scheduling quarrel.

But that’s what you get for having a doubles game that has spanned two centuries.

For eight years -- or is it nine? -- Lisa, Bret and I have met on Sunday mornings in Griffith Park to play two hours of tennis that is often rousing, occasionally pathetic but mostly good, sweaty fun. Over the years we’ve had several fourths, but it’s always been the three of us at the core. We’ve met every week, with exceptions made for vacations, illnesses and, in my case, a few months off to have a couple of babies. Up we’ve driven, along the shady swooping curve of Hillhurst Avenue, past the eloquently twisted trunks of the Morton Bay fig trees, their branches raised like sorcerers’ hands, their roots shoveling tablets of sidewalk up from the earth.

The parking lot at the Vermont Canyon courts is almost always full, between players’ cars and those of hikers. They bring their dogs and walk along the trails that run along the neckline of the hills, trails that can take you all the way up past the observatory to Mt. Hollywood or down to the carousel at the other side of the park.

There are 12 courts, which have to be among the prettiest, if not the best-kept, in the country. Surrounded by eucalyptus and pine, they are laved with sunshine and silence, save the pock of the tennis ball and the various sounds of the players -- the Armenian guys arguing (or maybe just discussing, I don’t speak Armenian); the woman who grunts every time she serves; the guy who says “oh niiiice” whenever his opponent gets one past him (which isn’t often); the old guy who is not afraid to swear loudly. Some of them have been around as long as we have, maybe longer, and they’re part of the game too.

This game has outlasted romantic relationships, jobs, homes, gym memberships and many personal, um, phases. Now, with two full-time jobs and two small children, my husband and I consider free time the most valuable commodity going. But even when I have offered, amid Sunday morning chaos, to quit the game, I knew I couldn’t. Fortunately, my husband knew it too. “Go, go, just go,” he says, while the milk spills and the Legos crunch underfoot.

We are, by no means, the only game in town. All over Los Angeles, there are softball games and poker games, bowling teams and lawn bowling groups that are older than most marriages and predate the participants’ children. In his new book, “Ten on Sunday: The Secret Life of Men,” Alan Eisenstock describes a 5-year-old weekly basketball game at his Santa Monica house in which the participants “bonded” as much as they played. The creation of this game, Eisenstock says, was a life-changing experience that led to ongoing friendships, and a support group not often found among men. The game was just the excuse.

It is a compelling tale, but it doesn’t really apply to an almost 10-year-old mixed-gender tennis game where emotional conversations lately often include the words “Bush administration” and are often prompted by “Did you see that article this morning....”

My friends are dear friends, and over the years we have shared much intimate and emotional information, but not on the tennis court. Our game, I think, is less about maintaining friendship -- we would do that without the game -- than it is about continuity. For its own sake.

Nowadays there is so much to be scheduled and so little actual need for scheduling. Church attendance is strictly optional, stores are open all hours every day, many workers rarely see the inside of an office much less a time card, the dinner hour is lost in a shifting sea of soccer practice and board meetings. With TiVo at our fingertips, we don’t even have to make sure we’re home by 9 on Wednesday -- we can watch our favorite show any time we want.

Flexibility rules, and in many ways that is a very good thing. But just as children do better with a set bedtime, most grown-ups need a few touchstones during the week to provide beacons through the chaos. A yoga class, a 12-step meeting, a sit-down family dinner, a date night, a morning walk with a friend, a tennis game.

“The game itself took on a life of its own,” says Eisenstock of his basketball game. “It was something you could count on. A commitment. And for men, commitment equals intimacy.”

Commitment also equals commitment. Many of us complain that in our multi-tasking, menu-driven, self-selection society there is no communal continuity, that even as we are brought closer together -- by housing shortages and a growing population, by omnipresent media -- we are becoming isolated emotionally and spiritually. That our relationships, even with our spouses and very best friends, seem catch-as-catch-can.

But continuity is an inside job. All it really requires is you. Showing up. For something. Every day or every week or every year, whatever seems appropriate.

But you have to show up even when you’re tired or you’re kind of mad at some comment made the time before, even when you have your period or a hangover, even when it seems pretty sad that you’ve been doing this for so many years, that your life has not somehow vaulted you into a grander, fancier version of itself.

You have to show up and have the same infuriating conversations about that girlfriend you know is no good (Why doesn’t he dump her?) or that landlord who never answers the telephone (Why doesn’t she just move?).

Or have that same darn argument about when summer really starts in Los Angeles or whether a person who says she’s too hot actually is too hot.

And even so, things will change -- our current fourth belongs to a country club, and while it’s quite lovely playing where towels and water are provided, there is a nagging sense of betrayal -- Griffith Park is our home and we are, at heart, a public-court game.

More important, Lisa is moving to New York in a month or so, which seems impossible and very inconsiderate -- does bicoastal love really trump a truly excellent doubles game? But she says she doesn’t consider it permanent, just for a couple of years, which we are choosing to believe. And if all goes well, we’ll be on the court Sunday morning, arguing still, when she gets back.