A day after my forty-third birthday, I met a friend at a municipal tennis court in Berkeley. The Bay Area had just suffered through a few weeks of wind and rain, which meant that tennis addicts like me had to squeeze whatever play we could into small pockets of sunshine. If surfers turn themselves into amateur oceanographers, tracking how a storm in Japan might affect a north-facing break in San Diego, tennis hacks are self-fashioned hydrologists, predicting exactly what time of day a neighborhood court will dry out. My friend and I know, for example, that, after a night of rain, Court One at the Rose Garden will be playable at around 11:30 A.M., when the sun finally starts to shine on the southern baseline. Court Two, which is higher up a hill, takes a little longer because of the shade cast from Court One. Live Oak Park—two blue courts down the hill from the Rose Garden—sits longer in the morning sun, but it also has a puddle issue.
