It was a tennis match I was supposed to win easily, against an up and coming female tennis player from a rival high school. Since she is a junior and I am a sophomore we had never played each other before.

Due to a lack of tennis players in the state, there was no separate male and female teams. Just one team open to either a male or a female. This also applied to several other sports, golf also being one of the sports. In the sport of tennis, some of the best players were female, their agility overcoming any male advantage due to their strength.

I am a recent addition to a work group, its sole function to court and sell a new customer our products. Our company manufactures different female products, from cosmetics to lingerie, and this retailer had withstood our best efforts to get them on board.

So our company put together a select group of people with different skills to approach and try to land the customer. All were female except me, my field of expertise not often inhabited by females. I am the numbers person, supplying all matter of statistics to impress and influence sales of our products, yeah right.

There was the phone call from my wife informing me that she would be an hour late. She did tell me not to fix dinner as she would pick up something for us on the way home. This is her women’s business meeting day, so it must be some meeting to cause her to be late.

I had the day off, promising to go with my sister and her daughter to the mall. It was her daughter’s birthday and she had been promised as a gift to get her ears pierced.

According to Sis, Haley had been so excited, barely talking of anything else. Greg, her husband, had to use their car today for a business meeting so I was drafted to give them a ride and preserve peace in this part of the free world.

I was back home for the first time in two years, excluding some brief visits several times a year. This time I was here to stay, my schooling concluded. The last two years of college consuming that time, with my degree in business economics finally obtained. I finished junior college in my home town, but wanted my degree to have a little more clout than just a state university.