Records of a Paddle
2019 was the last year I went back to Beaver County, Pennsylvannia for Christmas. My sister had just graduated, so Christmas doubled as a kind of send-off for her -- at the beginning of January she would leave America to join a Christian commune in New Zealand, working as a teacher. My dad had come in from Boston and was staying with his parents, who had themselves just moved back to Pennsylvannia after spending a year or two in Avon, Ohio. They kept bragging that their new house was down by the river, right next to Jerry's Curb Service. I was staying with my mom and brother at her parents' house, on a hill in the middle of nowhere -- which had been the usual location for our Christmases for the entire decade preceding this. The plan was the day after Christmas my mom, my dad, my mom's brother and his wife, and both sets of grandparents would put aside their differences and have a delightful dinner -- a one night of armistice -- at the Hibachi restaurant that we seemed to go to every time we went back to Beaver County. My sister wanted a family picture of us all together in front of the mural of Mt. Fuji behind the bar.
I forgot why exactly, but during the time leading up to the Hibachi dinner, I found myself with my dad. We had several hours to kill, so I convinced him to drove me to several different Goodwills, under the theory that they'd have a better selection than the Goodwill's in Baltimore. I was still under such delusions at the time because Tim Rogers had written many times in the early 2010s about his green-haired Japanese girlfriend making a business out of going to the American Midwest several times a year and raiding the thrift stores for vintage t-shirts then bringing them back to Japan to sell at exhorbinant prices. This theory didn't seem to apply to me though -- almost every article of clothing in the Beaver County Goodwills had some Pittsburgh sports logo on it. Then after much contemplation, I realized that even if I did come across the kinds of vintage t-shirts Tim Rogers wrote about, I probably wouldn't actually like them. Since when have I cared about Nascar or Batman or any of that imagery he seemed so enthralled with? It was simply the words "vintage t-shirt" that sparked my imagination, nothing more. A t-shirt can be anything -- whatever you print on it. When you add "vintage" in front of it, you wind up with an idea pregnant with possibilities. I was only ever interested in those possibilities -- never the actual realities.
After giving up on Goodwill, we still had some time. My dad suggested we go take a look at his parent's house since they weren't there at the moment. When we got there, he wanted to show me a kind of shrine my grandparents had set up to the paddle that they used to use to beat my dad and his siblings as children. It was roughly the size and shape of a cricket bat and had little flowers painted on it. "The Whooping Paddle". In every house my grandparents have ever lived in, they always had The Whooping Paddle hanging in a prominent place, but the reverence they showed for it seemed to increase as their adult children grew older and less spankable (incidentally "Spank" was the name of that Japanese lady's store). Beneath the Whooping Paddle was a black and white photo of my grandfather in high school, sporting massive horn-rimmed glasses -- which made the Whooping Paddle shrine kind of look like a shrine to him instead, as though he were dead. My father commented that there were no other pictures of family members in the entire house -- just the portrait of Napoleon and the Whooping Paddle.
Normally when I hear the word "paddle" in isolation, I do not think of the Whooping Paddle. Instead I just think of ping pong. I tried to get into ping pong when I had just started college. I thought it could help me meet people to practice Chinese with, but that plan never worked out. Any sport that involves bouncing a ball off a racket or paddle across a net is too complicated for my mind to work out. After several weeks going to the third floor ping pong center whenever I got off class, making a fool of myself in front of all the Chinese ping pongers at my school, I was too ashamed to ever go back.
I'd watched Ping Pong: The Animation. I liked the sound the ping pong ball makes hitting the paddle. I liked the rubbery texture of the paddles, brushing the dimpley surface over my skin. Yet ping pong as a sport wasn't for me. I would sometimes wonder if there's anyone out there for which ping pong paddles are a kind of fetish object. Whooping Paddles like my grandparents' certainly are -- it says so in the Wikipedia article -- but ping pong paddles seem too short and stubby to beat someone with properly.