Tennis Birthday Quotes

Beyond that box camera he saw in a shop window in Chicago in seventh grade, Dad has never wanted anything, as far as I know. He still coos over the tennis balls and Old Spice we give him every birthday, Father’s Day, and Christmas. And yet he understands the symbolic power that an earned object holds.

Childhood disappears down a storm drain. It flows, then trickles, then vanishes, leaving some olfactory memory—of new tennis balls, Sunday-morning bacon, a chemical cloud of Glade—to prove it ever existed. It seldom ends on a sixteenth birthday or an eighteenth birthday or some other calendar date, and rarer still is it stamped with a time of death. But sometimes it is.

In those days, tired of buying him tennis balls and socks and Old Spice for his birthday, we annually asked Dad if there wasn’t anything else he would like. And he always said the same thing. He gathered us to his side—Amy and The Boys; one redhead and four shitheads—and told us that he already had everything he ever wanted. The car is just a box to keep it in.