When I was a little kid, my neighbours decided to buy a table-tennis... well... uhm table. It was kept under lock and key in the storage by the block entrance. However, each summer day, the guys in my block and their gang down the street would take the table out and start playing, organising matches. I love the sound that little white ball made and I was watching like hypnotised from my balcony, both its constant movement from one player's side to another and the fancy strokes one of them would sometimes put up for show.I was rarely allowed outside on my own back then (and when I was, I was watched) but I used those occasions to watch from even closer. I had some paddles from my brother and sometimes I took them with me but I was usually too shy to ask (or maybe unconsciously wise enough to avoid a refusal) to play too so I usually settled with playing ball-boy. At some point, I know I did play a set with one of the 'grown-ups'. Till 6-0 that is.
My folks somehow disapproved of me fetching the balls for the guys, as well as of their company so when I wasn't allowed out, I vented my frustration guerrilla style, by throwing little lumps of earth from the flower pots on the balcony onto the ping pong table and quickly hiding in order not to be spotted (unnecessarily to say it was quite obvious it was me anyway).
And just as a side-comment of some significance: one of the guy's name was Mio (well, Miodrag actually)(whom 8-year old me thought was cute) and he was the prime suspect of scratching and drawing a red rose and the letters D and M onto the walls of our block's hallway. And that was somehow a bad thing, though I don't know why. Well, I know why scratching the walls is a bad thing, but the rose was kinda nice so I don't know why my brother was appalled by it. Much later did I find out that DM and the rose stood for Depeche Mode whom my brother as a declared rocker (though underground listener) felt the need to repudiate in public. Paranthesis closed.
Well, after a couple of years I got over the not-being-allowed-to-play-ping-pong drama of my life. I was old enough to be able to (difficultly) carry the table together with a neighbour's guy of my age. The guy had a net for it so we spent quite some afternoons ourselves playing. He also had a cool bycicle from his father (as some sort of compensation for him not being there anymore since his parents got separated, but his father was a cool guy himself) and I would sometimes ride around the block with him. On one of those occasion he tried to kissed me, as I figured out later, since I didn't have the faintest idea what the heck he wanted so I pushed him back and we nearly fell with the bike.
However, at some point later that year, with my neighbour's father moved away and the two other guys playing leaving the area, the big mean grown-ups (and hysterical old hags) decided that since no one in our block was playing, the table should move to another block's storage and it should stay there, since the constant clatter of the ball - the sound I so liked - was disturbing their summer afternoons' peace and quiet. Apparently me and the neighbour's boy were
'nobody'.Thus, the table and its hypnotising little white ball went away; after a while the neighbour's boy went away too. And the red rose was painted over with fresh paint on a big renovation. Most of the times it's just like none of them really existed in the first place. Seems they are there though, in a dusty corner of my mind, ready for sudden keyword-triggered flashbacks. And the keyword of the day is 'ping-pong'. So...
darksander (3/5/2009 6:02:30 PM): credits go to me then.