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By Root 189 0

has been a recurring nuisance in my life. Frisbee, or “disc,” as I have been corrected angrily many times, is one of the few sports artsy kids like to do, and so we’ve inevitably crossed paths. A good thing to know about me is that I’m terrible at Frisbee and I hate playing it so much. Catching it, obviously (I mean, close your eyes. Can you seriously picture me catching a Frisbee? No! You can’t even picture it in your imagination) but throwing as well. It always goes down like this: my Frisbee enthusiast friends insist that I would love Frisbee if I were taught how to throw. I decline. They persist, and I relent. So after careful instruction by my friends—but really, who has ever been able to make use of the advice “it’s all in the wrist”?—I give it a shot. I hurl the Frisbee (at some crazy-fast speed and far distance; I have always had meaty, strong arms) in completely the wrong direction until it lands on the other side of the park.

Unlike other athletes, Frisbee people won’t let it go. My theory is that this is because there’s a huge overlap between people who are good at Frisbee and people who do Teach for America. The same instinct to make at-risk kids learn, which I admire so much, becomes deadly when turned on friends trying to relax on a Sunday afternoon in the park. They feel they have to corral me into learning this useless sport. The afternoon becomes “unlocking Mindy’s passion for Frisbee,” instead of letting me lie on the grass reading my chick lit book. How dare you? If I had thought learning Frisbee was a valuable thing to do, I would’ve done it. I don’t want to learn! I don’t want to learn! Let me read Shopaholic Runs for Congress in peace!

PART THREE: ROPES

There is a famous photo of my older brother, Vijay, my cousin Hondo, and me climbing ropes at the Josiah Willard Hayden Recreation Centre in Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1984, when we were seven, six, and five years old, respectively. Famous in the sense that the local newspaper, The TAB, ran the picture for some reason. I guess the sight of three little Indian kids in roughly identical outfits with roughly the same haircut climbing ropes was interesting to their readers. But I remember, even as a five-year-old, thinking, Why am I being made to do this? I never see Mom and Dad climbing ropes! You can’t tell me this is useful!

What the photo didn’t show was that after it was taken, I climbed all the way up, which took me about forty minutes. Once at the top, I didn’t like the view and refused to climb down. Also my thighs were badly chafed and I had to go to the bathroom. Eventually, my counselors had to hoist up a ladder and pull me down, much to the embarrassment of Vijay and Hondo. I’m pretty sure Vijay claimed that Hondo was his sibling and I was the cousin.

Luckily the rope fiasco was eclipsed, several weeks later, when I accidentally pronounced jalapeño with a hard j in front of Vijay, Hondo, and some other campers. I’d only ever seen it printed on the side of a can of salsa. “You think it’s ja-lapeno?!” Hondo asked, incredulous. I did.

Vijay, Hondo, and me in descending order.

PART FOUR: MORSES POND

Amazingly, there is actually another instance from my childhood where I froze in the middle of an athletic pursuit, and it was much more serious. It occurred at Wellesley Summer Day Camp, where my brother and I were shipped out to as kids in the ’80s. The camp made daily visits to Morses Pond in Wellesley, Massachusetts. I didn’t like Morses Pond because there was no snack bar or gift shop like at Walden Pond. Where it had a significant leg up over Walden was that at least it didn’t have a scary ghost haunting it, which is who I assumed Henry David Thoreau was, and why everyone made such a big deal about him. A few years after I swam there as a kid, they made Morses Pond off-limits to swimmers. Apparently, it was saturated with contaminated soil from an abandoned paint factory. To its credit, I only remember it teeming with Canadian geese poop. Then, a few years after it was condemned, a rich physician hired a hit man to murder his wife