The Slapping Game

Photo by Chris Costes. Licensed through Creative Commons.

I can’t deny it much longer: my daughter Maddy is growing up. Within a few weeks she’ll be sixteen.

We’ve been talking about it, every now and then–how she has changed over the years, what she has gained and lost, what we have gained and lost. Some of these conversations are pretty moving, some even profound. And then there’s the fact that we no longer play the Slapping Game.

The Slapping Game was such a feature of our lives I wrote about it for NPR. So as a way of marking, rather than losing, the past, I’ve dug up the short piece I wrote back when we lived in Essex Center, when we could still sled down our back steps in winter, when Maddy didn’t yet have to come to me asking for help with covalent bonds and alkaline earth metals and I didn’t yet have to admit I knew nothing at all that would help.

The Slapping Game

Maddy invented the Slapping Game. Anyone else might call it volleyball, but Maddy hates volleyball so she calls it the Slapping Game.

The game goes like this. I take a sheet of 8 1/2 x 11 standard white printer paper and crumple it into a ball. Maddy stands in front of the woodstove, I stand in front of the china-and-glassware hutch, about eight feet away from her. I toss the paper ball underhand in a high arc, aiming for a spot about a foot or two above her head. She watches it and smacks it back at me with her open palm. I try to catch it. After about two minutes, our one-year-old border collie Phoebe wakes up and wanders over to a point midway between Maddy and me and watches intently, her ears pricked.

If I drop a catch, Maddy gets a point. If Maddy misses a reachable shot or just tips the ball with a finger and it goes behind her, usually down the stairs, I get a point. If Maddy hits the ball into Phoebe’s water bowl, she wins a goldfish. If the ball ends up on the floor, Phoebe is after it with astonishing speed. Whichever of us is closer dives at the ball. If we manage to grab it but Phoebe is so close we feel her jaw close beside our fingers, that’s called “doglips.” If Phoebe gets the ball she trots off with it into the living room and starts to rip it apart until she hears that we’ve started playing again with another ball from our supply of crumpled-up junk mail, at which point she loses interest in her half-shredded trophy and takes up her pounce position again.

It’s a great indoor game. The ball can ping off china or glass without knocking it over. I have to make fast adjustments to catch a rebound off the ceiling, or the hutch, or the wall, or the Christmas cactus. Maddy watches the arc carefully and adjusts by jumping, by stepping back, even by falling away to her left and reaching up like Stefan Edberg hitting a cross-court overhead to an attempted lob over his backhard side. She has invented names for each of these shots, none of which I can remember.

We play until someone reaches ten points, or twenty points, or until Phoebe eats the last available ball. Maddy has instinctively learned the snap of the wrist, and if I get the height of the toss just right she goes up, both feet off the hardwood floor, and smacks that thing so hard I don’t even try to catch it but spin round, hoping for a rebound off the corner cupboard where we keep the art supplies, the liquor, light bulbs and miniature marshmallows.

This is the thing about sport: it teaches us more than we can explain; it rewards us in ways we can’t put into words. Sport is older and deeper than words–it’s written with the body, in the body.

Maddy knows this. She knows that a perfect hit is a thing of beauty, an instant when every muscle in her body cooperates, her arm unreeling like a whip.

“Hoo yeah,” she says.