eska | Things need to be worth doing for themselves, not just for practice for some future time. (Reply)

I was talking to him about when he taught us to play tennis, and we went up to the Brecon Beacons and played on the uneven ground up there and afterwards on flat ground it was easy. I remember the skylarks singing high above and the tufts of bracken and the funny tufted reeds we used to call bamboo shoots. ... Grampar used to be proud of how fast we could run and how well we could catch a ball. He’d always wanted a boy, of course. It’s not that we wanted to be boys, it’s just that boys have so much more fun. We loved learning to play tennis.
And I thought all that was wasted, all that time practising up there, because Mor is dead and I can’t run and neither can Grampar, not any more. Except it wasn’t wasted, because we remember it. Things need to be worth doing for themselves, not just for practice for some future time. I’m never going to win Wimbledon or run in the Olympics (“They never had twins at Wimbledon…” he used to say) but I wouldn’t have anyway. I’m not even going to play tennis for fun with my friends, but that doesn’t mean playing it when I could was a waste. I wish I’d done more when I could. I wish I’d run everywhere every time I had the chance, run to the library, run through the cwm, run upstairs. Well, we mostly did run upstairs. I think of that as I haul myself up the stairs to Auntie Teg’s flat. People who can run upstairs should run upstairs. And they should run upstairs first, so I can limp along afterwards and not feel I’m holding them up.

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