For Something, Anyway

By Les Tanner

I’m a regular pickleball player at the YMCA in Caldwell, where another regular player is a guy I know fairly well. This story is about him and I suppose he could write it himself but he’d probably get facts wrong, or make something up, so I’m writing it for him. It involves a series of incidents in which this guy figured. Everyone who has played PB at the Y when he’s there would recognize him, which I guess is the point of the story.

His name is Les, or as he puts it, “That’s Les with one ‘s.’”

To say the guy is old is an understatement. But he seems proud of his age. Not long ago, he ran across a fellow shooting baskets at the gym.

They chatted for a while, and the guy said “Your name is Les, isn’t it? I remember playing racquetball with you. I was twenty then and was amazed that a forty-five-year old could still play racquetball.”

That was forty-five years ago.

Whenever Les is not playing PB, he wears an orange hat [see “The Hat,” IDAHO magazine, February 2022]. It’s kind of grubby and beat up, but it does the job of getting him recognized. At grocery stores, in parking lots, restaurants, wherever, someone is always coming up to him and saying, “Hey, aren’t you…?”