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I recognized him as soon as he walked in the gym, the father of an old friend. He comes to watch the local high school teams play basketball.
His face is familiar, he knows most of the other fans (though fewer and fewer each year). A walk from the doorway to his favorite seat is fits and starts of conversation, handshakes, well wishes; “How’s your mom doing?” “You get that tractor fixed? Snow tires soon, going to be cold winter.”
He’s stooped at the shoulders, hunched, but just a little, head bent slightly forward. Gravity has done it’s inevitable, inexhaustible work on him for a lot of years. He wears a driving cap that covers a bald pate and sits above bushy eyebrows. The hat is soft and worn. You can tell the two of them, man and brim, put in some miles together.
This time, walking through the gym, he has his grandson in tow. A young boy who’s tenth birthday is somewhere in the future. The boy holds the old man’s hand firmly, smiles easily as grandpa makes his slow, sure way to the far end of the bleachers. They stop and watch the home team do warm-up drills.
A stray ball bounces where they stand courtside. The boy instinctively lets go of the man’s hand and bends down to grab the ball, picks it up and holds it to his chest. A player run over to him and holds out his own hands, palms up. The boy looks to the old man as if to say, “The ball, Don’t I get to keep it?”
The old man waves a wrinkled hand from inside a too-big coat. The boy frowns and pushes the ball to the player, who steps closer and bumps knuckles with the boy, an adult move from a teenager. The boy smiles, the old man smiles.
From the scorer’s table, the horn blows. Game time.
The PA announces the visiting team. Then the home team.
This same scene is playing out all over the county, the country. Boys and girls are lining up across a thousand foul lines. Toeing the hardwood in various degrees of physical and emotional condition, some strong, some weak; some confident, some wary. Some hurting, some hurtful. Some filled with excitement in their full flush of youth. Some in pain and confusion at their increasingly awkward and vulnerable place in the world.
But all are trying, to do well, to find their place, to hold their heads somewhere important in this gym, along this continuum of time in their lives. None are trying to fail, to do harm that is outside their capacity for reason and accomplishment. That’s a good thing to remember, for everyone assembled to understand. We all act at our capacities of experience and development, we are what we’ve been built to do, by society, by our upbringing, by our relatives, our situations and our teachers. The old man will bark at the officials, demean the coach, question the motive and effort of the kids playing the game.
Or he won’t. He’ll sit and watch and enjoy and appreciate all that the game has to offer.
The boy will take it all in, he’ll learn, he’ll remember.
The national anthem begins. The man drops the boys hand and places it over his chest, motions for the boy to do the same. The boy does, and the Star Spangled Banner plays, not the note dragging Whitney Houston one, the fast one, all horns and percussion.
“What so proudly we hailed…”
The boy, righthand across his heart, reaches across and tugs on the old man’s sleeve. The man, a little distracted, frowns and looks down at the boy. The boy points to the man’s head where the old friend, the driving cap sits. The man’s eyebrows go up, and a quick flush of embarrassment crosses his brow. He removes the cap and returns to the flag. The boy mouths the words, “oer the land of the free…”
I watch this from across the gym,
“and the home of the brave…
And I smile.
Bill Burk's collective writing...and some other stuff. 