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 This afternoon we found ourselves flying up route 128 towards Glouster,
past that
inexplicable stretch where you are simultaneously going North
on 93 and SOUTH on 128, with Norma Yvonne riding shotgun and dark clouds
gathering on the horizon, promising spring showers.
"Tell me again why you want to drive for an hour to buy a little piece
of plastic you could get five minutes from the house?’ she coyly inquired.
"What I need is not a ‘piece of plastic’. It’s a highly specialized
piece of medical equipment." We have been suffering of late from an
acute case of tennis elbow, tendonitis to the medically inclined,
and besides keeping us up at night, the stabbing pain was starting to
affect out game. A fellow member of the "Just Don’t Suck" Tennis
Club, a doctor of some kind, swears by a gel and velcro contraption. He
says there is no medical reason it should work, but it does.
"This place I want to go is the most complete sporting goods store in
the area. When
something as important as physical mobility is at stake, you want to
go where they have the best products, and the best variety. You want
to have choices."
Actually, what we had was a coupon. Norma was along because, well,
it WAS shopping, after all, and she knew stores are like the cracked
brakes on Amtrak’s
Acela Express – when you find one, there are sure to be hundreds of others
nearby.
As we parked she spotted a Pier 1 Imports across the tarmac and we
arranged to meet back at the car. We were headed for the brand new, three
story
Sports
MegaStore,
Dick’s Sporting Good, a mammoth silo featuring several complete campgrounds,
four and eight man sculls hanging from the ceiling, and a 50-foot climbing
wall.
The only other place we knew that had the brace we wanted for sure was
the hoity toity overpriced specialty store on Mt. Auburn St. in Harvard
Square. We refused to shop there on general principle. If
anybody besides the Harvard Tennis and Squash Club had the elbow braces,
it would
be
Dick.
We wandered in and ambled over to Tennis, feeling old and decrepit among
so many buff bodies and gen whatever sporsters. We found hundreds of
tennis racquets, Prince and Head and Dunlop and Wilson. Balls galore.
Strings, and vibration absorbers, and tape and grips and gloves and visors. But
no elbow braces, or any other kind of palative aids. We started
looking around for a special section of sports medicine or braces, but
nothing!
We were outraged! They had every conceivable piece of equipment
to play any possible sport you could think of, but absolutely nothing
to help you when you hurt yourself playing them! Nothing to intimate
that participating in all these wonderful sports can cause painful, crippling
injuries. No section for aging weekend warriors.
Our righteous indignation boiled up and so of course we immediately
started thinking of a blog post. We would enumerate all of the
ridiculous and exotic equipment they have, and wind up with the one
thing they don’t. We whipped an old receipt out of our wallet and
started scribbling.
They had a whole football field full of hunting and fishing gear, with
enough camouflage to outfit a third world insurrection, camouflaged pants
and
ponchos and
sleeping bags and tents,. They had guns of every variety and enough
survival gear to outlast the Apocalypse. They had a half dozen different
turkey decoys and a Terminator Elk System. We saw over 800 fishing poles,
and
a variety of lures including Got-ya Jig Heads, electronic fish finders
and freeze-dried pre-cooked Scrambled Eggs and Bacon in clever, self-heating
foil pouches. There were canoes, kayaks and sculls, bicycles, free weights,
treadmills, rowing
machines,
and additional rows of mean-looking machines of no obvious purpose. They
had speed bags, heavy bags duffle bags and a whole section of whatever
you need to perform
Pilates, whatever that is.
 In the
middle of the store was a huge island dedicated exclusively to sunglasses.
There were balls of everywhere: base, basket, soccer, tennis, ping pong, paddle, squash,
volley, dodge, hand, foot, golf, bowling, soft, billiard, playground, candlepin
and bocce. Not to mention pucks, birdies and stones.
But nothing for an aching tennis elbow.
We had circumnavigated both floors of the huge sports warehouse, and
were back where we started, in the tennis section. Disgusted, we looked
behind us before marching from the premesis – and there they were. Sportopedics
Nitro Armbands. $12.95 (with the coupon, half what they cost in Harvard Square).
In the words of the inestimable Rossana Rossanadana, "Never mind." |
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