Tennis is a sport that I have never been terribly interested in. I do remember the tennis unit that we had in high school, maybe it was junior high. And, you know, the -- I was just telling my husband this this year -- is that the main thing I remember from that is that my PE teacher said that if we were gonna wear tennis skirts, we needed to learn how to pick up the tennis ball without bending over. And she showed us this technique where, like, you hold the ball against your foot with the racket. And I, you know, I don't know, I can't remember her technique, but she was just -- she was, like, really firm about this. She said she hated to be driving by the tennis courts, and she would see people, like, bending over to pick up a ball. And she felt like they were just kind of, like, flashing people going by, and I don't know. That was her thing. So, I'm pretty sure she didn't want that to be the only takeaway from her tennis instruction, but that is what stuck with me.

So I was not brought up in the tradition of going trick or treating. And I do not buy candy on Halloween day to dish out to children at night. I do not leave my porch light on. And for the past several years, since 2021, when I moved back into this house in Georgia, I have never had anyone come and knock on my front door on the night of Halloween and I was not expecting it this year. But at 6:45 p.m., on the night of October 31st, I was sitting in my living room watching NBC Nightly News -- an important tradition for me. When all of a sudden, I heard a large loud BAM, BAM, BAM on my front door. Someone was beating hard on my front door. By the way, my doorbell is broken. I have a screen door that I usually keep latched between my wooden front door and the Great Outside, but I have not been latching it recently because the latch had been -- become hard to work. And so I was just leaving it unlatched, not realizing that I was putting myself at risk. So because they could open the screen door, the people were banging hard on my front door. It sounded like someone was chopping my door down with an axe. Well, of course, I was not gonna open the door under those circumstances because I didn't know whether I would be facing an axe murderer or not. That taught me a valuable lesson: from now on, I'm locking that screen door every time I come back in the house.