“Maybe the next time I see you, you’ll play better.”

That was Alexandrina, my tennis instructor, at the end of my third day of adult tennis camp in Florida last week. Blond, strong, charming really, in her 20s, and originally from Bulgaria, she had patiently been hitting balls to me in the exact right spot for me to blast top-spin forehands and backhands back at her in the hot sun. I had really wanted to come to tennis camp and work on my game, but I hadn’t exactly been blasting anything. “You just need to learn the basics,” she added.

She didn’t need to say that. I’ve been playing tennis since I was eleven when my mother was the one on the other side of the net arcing balls over to me at the public courts near our house in Washington, D.C. I went on to compete as a junior and even played on the Stanford Varsity freshman year. Granted it was before Title 9 turned women’s sports into serious business, but still, I’m not a beginner.

Then again, Alex, who majored in coaching at college, now teaches teenagers from all over the world at this Florida tennis academy where I’d come for a few days. These kids play several hours each day and attend school on the side in a building overlooking the courts. So, of course, my tennis level is basic.

Still, it hurt my feelings. And it also made me want to get better and come back next year.

Why do I even care? Unlike these teenagers, I don’t have an international tennis career ahead of me. But I do have an image in my mind of the tennis player I want to be and an image of the tennis player I am. I want them to be the same.

In a way, that’s how I learned to telemark ski. Several years ago, I was cross-country skiing on gently rolling terrain at the base of Mt. Rainier in Washington state with friends and looked up to see two guys floating down a lower flank of the mountain, deep powder flying around them as they made their telemark turns on bended knee, and I thought that’s what I want to do.

Never mind that I was afraid of heights at the time, did not alpine ski, and had hyperventilated a third of the way up a green (basically flat) beginner’s slope during a group cross-country ski lesson at Snoqualmie Pass in Washington. I wanted to learn to telemark ski. After years of working at it, I can now probably get down that slope at Mt. Rainier, although I’ve always actually wondered.

And so with tennis, it’s somewhat the same. I don’t look at Venus or Serena and say, “That’s what I want to do,” since I know I never could. But I do want to hit hard and accurately the way they do.

Surprisingly, that’s not what Alex had me practice during our session. Instead, she told me to get further behind the ball and transfer my weight forward as I hit it. “That’s the easiest place to be,” she said. “Hit effortlessly. No matter where the ball lands.” She had me running way back to get behind a deep ball, and then racing forward (and stopping) before hitting a short one. The same stroke, the same position, no matter where the ball landed. That one drill for over an hour.

At one point, I told her I lacked confidence. She didn’t ask me why or speak about confidence like it was a character trait that you either had or you didn’t. Instead, she said, “It’s different for each person how many times you have to do something until you feel confident.” Like it was something someone could learn, that I could learn. And she told me to move my opponent around on the court and wait until they are off to one side before coming to net. “That way, you don’t have to put pressure on yourself to hit the perfect shot.”

That advice alone was worth the trip to tennis camp — building confidence through steady practice and setting things up to make it easy on yourself.

At the end of our final drill, she said, “After all the balls we hit, look how few are on your side of the net. You have beaten your first opponent – the net.”

Maybe one day I will actually master the basics and move on.

Nearly every week, when terrorists blow themselves up in crowds to kill civilians, or people like the marathon bombers in Boston leave backpacks behind to kill and main the very kids and families they walk among as they leave the scene, it’s hard to maintain faith in humanity. The amazing Syrian refugee Yusra Mardini restores our hope. She’s the teenage Olympic competitor, who previously swam for three hours helping to pull a sinking boat to safety to save 20 lives. And there are millions of others whose names we will never know, often not on such an epic scale but, even when they have little themselves, selflessly helping strangers.

One was a skinny boy, probably no more than 16, who stood opposite me, as I got off a bus in Acapulco early one morning, and asked if I needed help. I remember his clear dark eyes and not much else. I had just traveled from somewhere, Cuernavaca, I think, but my memory is vague years later.

I was exhausted and had nowhere to go for hours until my parents arrived. They were flying in from Washington, D.C. to meet me. I hadn’t seen them in five months. After graduating from college, I’d left the U.S. for Latin America with no desire to return. Ever. This was the 1970s, with fury over the war in Vietnam and over the hypocrisy of U.S. government officials who preached democracy at home and overthrew governments abroad. But now, I was making my way back north.

I don’t remember a bus station in Acapulco, maybe there was one or maybe the bus driver unloaded us onto the street. I only remember this boy. “Tienes hambre?” he asked. I nodded. I hadn’t eaten since sometime the day before.

He led the way. I’d been traveling like this for months. Wandering. No maps or real knowledge of where I was or where I was going, a little money and a little Spanish and hardly any luggage. It had gotten me from southern Colombia, almost at the border with Ecuador, to here. And now this boy wanted to buy me breakfast.

I’m sure I was older than he was, probably 21 to his 16. I’ve always looked young. When I was 17, I was mistaken for 13, so he probably thought we were the same age.

He took me through the cluttered market, the smell of left-over grime and garbage from days before wafting through. I don’t remember seeing the ocean or feeling a salt-air breeze. I wasn’t in a resort.

He sat me on a stool at a counter in a market stall and spoke to a middle-aged woman on the other side of the counter. Soon a plate mounded with scrambled eggs appeared with tiny fish fried up into them. The minnows crunched in my mouth, head and all. He watched and smiled. This must be his favorite dish. I tried to get him to eat some, but he refused. While I crunched away, he kept smiling, like he was happy seeing me eat, like I was his sister or his best friend.

Then he asked if I was tired. I nodded. He led me through some alleys and into a building where we walked through a couple of open rooms with no furniture, past people sleeping on the floor on blankets. I had no idea what this was. In the third room, he motioned for me to lie down and handed me a blanket from the corner. He lay down next to me and draped his arm over me. We went to sleep. No kissing, no groping, just sleeping.

A few hours later, I woke up, headachy and hot. The sun had made the room feel sweaty and crowded. It was time to go. I was meeting my parents soon. And I felt guilty. I had wandered into his world and was wandering out, just like that, but he wasn’t. This perfect smiling boy, asking nothing of me, wanting nothing in return except to feed me and take care of me, was staying behind.

And before long, I was riding in a pink cart up to a cliff-side cottage overlooking the ocean at Las Brisas with my parents. Transported a world away, effortlessly. I thought about the one below us, the one I had just left. It didn’t seem possible that other world existed only minutes away — where eating a full meal was so special it made someone happy just to watch. And it didn’t seem at all fair.

I don’t know why that boy helped me or what I meant to him or what he might have wanted from me had I stayed. All I know is that morning he was generosity and love. And all I can do is try to pass it on.

Recently, I finished the latest revisions to my young adult manuscript after spending all fall putting it off even though I’d reduced my time at work to 25% specifically to have more hours for writing. The energy and motivation came to me only after I was hired for a very demanding, new job, starting January 1.

I guess I’d been discouraged. The hardest part about writing this story, and the reason I’m doing it, is that it’s true, not word-for-word true, but all of the events actually happened. It’s the story of a fictional, 14-year-old Armenian boy, named Arakel, caught up in the genocide 100 years ago in the Ottoman Empire. It’s not about any member of my family, but I feel I owe it to all of the people who suffered or died in the genocide to convey what they went through.

Arakel’s nearly dying voice in the desert came to me clearly years ago. At public readings in San Francisco and Somerville, after receiving awards for the manuscript, I’ve read from a chapter in the middle of the book where a camel caravan master picks Arakel up in the desert after he’s spent the night in a cave filled with bones. I’ve hardly revised that section since I first wrote it.

But how did Arakel feel before that, before he knew nearly all of his family, nearly all of the people in his town, nearly all of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were going to die? And where should I start the story so teenagers with no knowledge of the genocide or the Ottoman Empire could relate? I’ve tried at least five different points in time, but none worked well.

If you write a book about the Holocaust, everyone knows what happened to Anne Frank. You don’t have to explain who Hitler was. But the Armenian genocide is different. And it’s not just teenagers who might not know. I received a query response from a literary agent on April 24, 2015 — the same day as the 100-year commemoration of the Armenian genocide, after the Pope had recognized the genocide, and the Armenian Church had canonized 1.5 million Armenian martyrs — and this agent suggested I rework the manuscript as a middle grade adventure. For the first and I hope the only time, I lost it with an agent and fired back an angry email. A lot of people died. This wasn’t an adventure.

But there I was, still revising Chapter One, still trying to create an instant connection with readers. My wonderful Critique Group stood by me with helpful suggestions, but by then they knew Arakel nearly as well as I did. I even hired Miss Snark’s First Victim to comment on the first 30 pages. She was brutal: “I’m confused and not in a good way.” And that was just her opening salvo. I won’t repeat the rest, but she ended her critique by saying, “I know you can do this.”

So I had to try. When I reduced my time to 25% at the beginning of September, and my son went off to college, which I instantly wrote about and the Washington Post picked it up for its “On Parenting” Blog (“My college freshman and the very delayed first call home”), I did not get right to work on my manuscript. Instead, I volunteered for added duties at a non-profit, worked out at my health club every day, even cleaned the house — anything other than write.

Then in December, when I got hired for a full-time job to start January 1, that’s what did it. It was now or never. I had to finish. On an unusually warm December morning, I sat on a bench outside my favorite coffee shop in Cambridge, and the first line came to me. It was so obvious I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before. The rest fell into place.

The other day, I re-queried an agent, whom I’d thought would be perfect, and right away, she requested the full manuscript. It’s in her queue. Three months to wait. I can’t get my hopes up. I’ve been here before. I can’t get too excited, but of course I am. I’m hoping this time will really be it. I’ll let you know.

As a kid, I was never a ballerina in a fluffy tutu. I hated dresses. I played with stuffed animals, not dolls. I grew up being called a Tom-Boy. But recently, I stumbled into a Ballet Barre Workout class at my health club, when I was late for the class I meant to attend, and now ballet barre is my favorite thing.

Our teacher is tough. “Pull in those abs, Sarah. Harder. Tuck in your bottom, Sarah. Turn your feet out.” And I love it. When she tells us “to look straight toward the horizon and plié with dignity,” we do and beam. Our inner five-year-olds are very happy. We don’t care the mirrors lining the walls are trying to remind us of a different reality. We check our positions, tuck in our butts, and “gaze at the people in the loge box seats.”

Our teacher treats us like ballerinas. Maybe it’s her piano music tape, or her careful corrections: “Lift your arms over your head, slightly in front of you, so you could just see your fingers if you looked up” (which you are not allowed to do). Maybe it’s the delight she expresses when for a brief moment we are all balancing on our toes, arms curved overhead, without wobbling or holding onto the barre.

Whatever it is, the class casts a spell. If I were actually five, I’d probably hate it. In fact, at the only ballet class my mother ever took me to when I was about five, the teacher suggested to my mother that I not come back, “She’s definitely athletic but not a dancer.”

I was never the girly type. We have a photograph of a family gathering with my great grandmother in the center and my grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, siblings and cousins. I’m about four years old, wearing a pink party dress and a long-sleeve flannel shirt underneath. Years later, I asked my mother about it. “You refused to put on your dress. That was the compromise.”

I was upset in third grade when my father made my older brother and his friend Brad stop playing tackle football with me. Flag football only. When I was in sixth grade, my father lectured my brother about not throwing the baseball too hard at me after dinner when we played catch in our yard. So we waited until Pop went back indoors and resumed.

I played tons of sports in high school and played tennis competitively in the 18-and- Unders. People finally stopped calling me a Tom-Boy, but that hardly helped. When I tottered downstairs to our front hall one evening in the 11th grade, wearing a red chiffon dress and black heels for ballroom dancing/etiquette class, which I attended with my older brother, he yelled, “Look, it’s Minnie Mouse!”

I always thought there were boys and there were girls and then there was me, somewhere in the middle. Is that because everyone called me a Tom-Boy? Or something deeper? I was always attracted to guys, so that was that. What was there to think about? I just felt different.

When I was living in Montana in my twenties, I stayed once with two friends my age at their ranch. They were married and their uncle was visiting. I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, and had my hair pulled up under a cap. Their uncle, who had recently retired from a lifetime career as a prison guard and wore the steel-toed shoes to prove it, looked at me, looked away and looked back again. He turned to them, “Is that your boy?” I’m not exactly shapely, but still. Did that make me a twelve-year-old boy?

What was this all about? A question of gender identity? Or just a girl who loved sports as a kid and hated dresses?

Does it matter? I don’t know. All I know is for the first time ever I want to be a ballerina. Oh, and I also want to learn how to box. Something else I’ve never done.

On Parenting
By Sarah B. Ignatius | November 6

Photo courtesy of iStock

When the college president stood before my husband and me, and hundreds of other parents assembled in the chapel after dropping our freshmen off, he told us we shouldn’t text our sons and daughters but use e-mail instead. And that we should wait before responding if they texted us. I understood.

“What the world needs is problem-solvers,” he had said to drive his point home.

That makes sense, I thought as I sat there. My husband has been on a campaign to foster independence since our son was 6 and we first started arguing over whether he was too young to ride the public bus alone. My husband swears he was taking public transportation in New York City himself by that age. And I went nearly 3,000 miles away for college in California at 17, calling home collect from a pay phone in the hall. And here we were, feeling grief-stricken that our only child was leaving us for college, hoping he wouldn’t hear it in our voices.

See the full essay here.

The week before I started freshman year of college in California (some time ago), I spent the night with my two girl cousins, sleeping in twin beds with a cot between us. The older of my two cousins, who was in high school, asked me what I thought about the meaning of life. She still poses big questions, probably picking up the trait from her deep-thinking father, my favorite uncle. I told her I thought life was like a clock ticking. The large round dial of her alarm clock glowed on the bedside table between us. “You just have to wait for it to wind down.”

“You don’t really mean that, do you?” she asked.

“I do.”  Depressing, I know.

I did attend college that fall and, after dropping out twice, did graduate.

Then I left the United States, hoping never to return. I was furious about the war in Vietnam and about our country preaching democracy at home and toppling governments abroad that didn’t serve our economic interests.

I worked for an anthropologist in Chiapas, Mexico, and made my way south through Central America with friends and eventually southern Colombia, by this time traveling alone. I fell in with some people from the United States, who were making a circuit of Latin America and who urged me to renew my Colombian visa in Ecuador, which wasn’t far away, come back to Colombia and travel some more. Several of my new friends had just been in Chile, where the United States was overthrowing the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende because he was nationalizing key industries.

From that remote spot, I wondered what to do. More than ever, I hated the United States, but I realized it was my country. If I was upset, I should go back and do something about it.

And here’s the part where the Pope and Bernie come in. They’re telling us the same thing — we have a moral responsibility to each other and to this planet.

Bernie, a Jew from Brooklyn, who, in his own words, is not particularly religious, features on his presidential campaign website a direct quote from the Pope: “we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. – Pope Francis.” (link)

During his closing remarks at Democratic Debate #1, Bernie asked all of us to take action: “Nobody up here can address the major crises facing our country unless millions of people begin to stand up to the billionaire class that has so much power over our economy and our political life.”

Pope Francis has given us the same message. His environmental encyclical in June called on “every person who lives on this planet.” In his public appearance to the crowds outside the U. S. Capitol in September, he reached out to people whether they believe in God or not: “I ask you all please to pray for me and if there are among you any who do not believe or who cannot pray, I ask you please to send good wishes my way.”

Why would the most powerful Christian leader in the world need us, whether we believe or not? He says he has many weaknesses and problems. “I am a sinner too,” he says.

He’s also saying everyone matters. Not just the great, the powerful and the righteous. Our voices make a difference too.

Bernie and the Pope are pleading with us to take action, to get involved and to make the world a more just, equitable and sustainable place.

And I’ve realized that fighting for what I believe in has given me a reason for being here.

It doesn’t really matter that Serena lost in the semi-finals of the U.S. Open and fell short of accomplishing the nearly impossible feat of winning all four Grand Slam tournaments in the same year. She’s a champion, and so is her sister Venus, definitely for their awesomeness on the tennis court, and most especially for showing us what dedication and hard work can accomplish.

Nothing was handed to these two sisters from Compton, who’ve dominated women’s tennis for nearly 20 years. In a sport usually associated in the U.S. with exclusive country clubs, Venus and Serena trained with their dad on cracked, public courts in a predominantly African-American city in southern California, practicing at 6 a.m. before school and again after school until dinner, gun fire popping in the background, their father fighting off gangs, and eventually gang members surrounding their court for protection. Not exactly the All England Club.

A few nights ago on center court at Arthur Ashe Stadium, named for the first African-American man to win a Grand Slam (the top four tennis tournaments in the world, played in Australia, France, England and the U.S.), over 23,000 people were transfixed by the sisters slugging it out against each other. Family tennis anyone?

When Venus and Serena first burst onto the professional tennis scene, lots of people had unkind words. They didn’t fit in, they were tall and strong, they hit hard, they had big serves, and they were black. People said they were too self-confident, they had power and nothing else, their father made a huge mistake training them himself for so long, and on and on. But Venus and Serena persevered, training hard, staying focused, and winning, and in the process, won over all of our hearts too.

They have shown us what we like to think is still true about this country, even as the divide between rich and poor widens and a class society takes hold and so much racial discrimination persists that we need a movement called Black Lives Matter. These two women have demonstrated that if you work really hard, if you keep fighting for your dream, if you stay determined and confident despite criticism and racial slurs, and if you’re courageous enough, you will indeed go far.

As Serena said to a group of girls in Nigeria, “It doesn’t matter what your background is and where you come from, if you have dreams and goals, that’s all that matters.” (reported by Benjamin F. Chavis, Atlanta Voice, June 12, 2015).

And that’s what their greatest legacy is — the inspiration they give to people all over the world — to dream big, then work incredibly hard to get there. Thank you Venus and Serena!

Do you look up to the Williams sisters too? Who’s inspiring to you?