Pale Fire: Illustrated Sports Illustrated Sports Pale Fire Journal | Page 10

The 1959 Olympic Ping Pong Tournament
Announcer: We have before us four different
teams for this Olympic tournament, and
each has come with their own set of
strengths and weaknesses. Each team will
play and be allotted time to present their ar-
gument for why they deserve this medal, and
then the judges will decide who wins the
gold!
Team Etobnik & Lezah: Good evening judges and spectators! Our team will win
the gold because we have a bond like no other. We are so in tune with one an-
other that it is almost as if we are the same person. In the lines 312 and 475 of
our father’s poem he jumps from “my gentle girl appeared as Mother Time” to
“Father Time, all gray and bent” (44, 50), which alludes to the transition from
Lezah the young girl to the older man Father Time, who is Etobnik. One in the
same person overall, but if broken down into increments you can see our differ-
ences. Our father also noticed our similarities however with a note about
“sometimes I’d help her with a Latin text” (46), which was something Lezah en-
joyed as a young girl as well as what Etobnik went on to study as a grown man.
There are still things that remind us of being Lezah, like when we moved into
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