Finding a place in this world to be happy

Kirk Ericson | Apr 07, 20220

I got an email a couple of weeks ago from a Journal reader inviting me to join some people who play pingpong Wednesday nights at Little Skookum Hall Community Club.

This is one of the fringe benefits of being a newspaper columnist.

I went, and for one of the few times during this plague, I recognized that the activity I was engaged in, which required being indoors sharing air with maskless and hard-breathing people, was worth increasing the risk of contracting COVID-19.

We’ve all had to make decisions about the hill we’re willing to die on during this 2-year-old plague. It’s a risk vs. benefit analysis. For some, their hill was treating COVID patients in hospitals. Others have helped people without shelter avoid contracting COVID. Some have attended large family gatherings.

Admission to pingpong night at Little Skookum Hall required just two $1 dollar bills, which were slipped into a coffee cup atop the kitchen counter. The counter was covered in classic Formica, if I recall correctly, and that $2 bought us a couple of hours of pingpong-playing joy, which is as fine a pleasure-vs.-cost ratio as you’re likely to find in this world.

Six players showed and we played doubles and singles on two tables. The building, which dates to the late 1940s, is a homey space, commonly used for functions that attract people under pleasant circumstances. It’s the opposite of a mortuary. The gym has two old basketball hoops fixed opposite each other, and the entire space has a musky feel, redolent of decades of festivity and activity.

I beat everyone in singles except Dan, a genial 80-year-old from Belfair, and he whipped me. He whipped me good. He’s finished second a few times in the Washington State Senior Games in pingpong. Dan plays with a type of paddle rubber known as “pips out,” which kills an opponent’s spin so the ball floats back to you, creating an effect reminiscent of a knuckleball in baseball. It encourages wild and frustration-inducing swings by one’s opponent, and often prompts the defeated one to ask to check the opponent’s paddle so one can inspect its spin-deadening mysteries.

Pingpong is an Olympic sport you can play longer than just about any sport you’ll find in the Olympics. I once got demolished by a fellow in his 80s who laughed each time he returned one of my slams. He didn’t speak English so I couldn’t confirm his mockery, but the harder I hit the ball, the harder he’d laugh in my direction.

Even with this occasional mockery, pingpong fosters a spirit unlike other sports I’ve played, maybe because you don’t need an arbiter to enforce the rules, and it’s nearly impossible to cheat. The ball either makes it over the net or it doesn’t. The ball either hits the table or it doesn’t.

Here are a couple of pingpong stories:

In June 2002, I won the inaugural, and as it turned out, the final Tenino Table Tennis Tournament. The tourney was staged by a fellow who told me he wanted to give back to the community … after living a life of illegally removing items from the community. He said he hoped kids who competed in his tourney could create happy memories and that the players, no matter how hard their lives get, could someday hear a bouncing pingpong ball and remember a time when life was as simple and pure as playing pingpong.

What a sweet thought, I remember thinking, but that same fellow was later charged with embezzling money from his son’s Boy Scout troop. Still, maybe there’s some kid out there who played that tournament and associated the sound of a pingpong ball with being happy.

We are all imperfect vessels.

I played a fellow named Doug back in the 1990s who liked to smoke cigarettes while he played. He’d keep the cigarette between his lips in the middle of points, and he was so steady and moved with such an economy of motion that half his cigarette could be ash without falling off. His hands were so fast he didn’t have to move the rest of his body. In the olden days, he would have been the quickest of the quick draws.

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