To Eleven by Ones

It's happening.

It's happening, just like they said it would.  What began some four or five months ago as a barely-perceptible rivulet of curiosity has swelled to a mile-wide Nile of Inquiry.  Little J has entered her first Age of Questions.  Whimsical, sincere, surreal, mundane - most of her utterances now are interrogative.

At the dining room table:  "Wha' happen if I ate Roooooobin?"

On the tire swing:  "Wha' happen if I let go of this chaaaaain?"

In the kitchen: "Who's not related to me?"

In the car:  "Who's Mrs. Houser?" 

On the porch:  "You want some of this cooooorn?"

In the living room:  "What day is not a school day?"

In the bedroom:  ''Dad could you talk about aliens?"

At the table:  "Why's Robin have two teeeeeef?"

At the table: "Mom -  hahahaha -  is Dad a boy or a girl?"  

We like to have fun with this.  Sometimes at dinner, during an especially relentless spell, Jessica will say, "Jean, let's do impressions.  Who am I? Mawm, which kitty is faaaaat? Daddy, what's a tornaaaaado?"  Jean loves this.  She goes, "Meee!"

Of course, her questions are easy to field, more or less.  The bigger ones with longer answers are naturally making their inexorable way down her path of wonderings, but it may be a few more months or years before they take shape.  Perhaps some of them will coincide with the correct pronunciation of the prayers we're currently mangling.  So, as she says "I pray the Gord my slow to take" I am not surprised that we haven't had a question about def yet.  When it comes, I think I'll be ready.  There's the short answer to that one, and then there's the one that never ends, which is called Life.  Def is what gives Life meaning, makes it precious, provides it with order, makes it worth living, and makes all questions worthy.

So I have a new question too.  Jean's never heard it. Jess says Yes.  Robin just laughs and throws broccoli.

This important question is:  can I run three miles in 18 minutes?

In September, a high school friend up in Colorado and I decided to take on this challenge.  This goal appealed to us in its simplicity.   We needed neither gym membership nor JumpSoles.  No silly broad-jumping across a court beneath the integrity-preserving cover of darkness.  Just running a few miles slightly faster each time until we're going six minutes per mile for three miles.  That's ninety seconds per lap, for twelve laps.  When you break it down that way, it sounds like pie.  Ninety second lap?  I recall a plodding high school track teammate - dude had a foot on the ground at all times - huffing and chugging his way to 70 seconds back in 1994. Our paper-plate award for him was called Prisoner of Gravity.  I drew a picture of him in a cage.  So twenty seconds slower than him? P.O.G. crosses and then twenty seconds later I can cross?  Cake. 

Some answers so far:  one of those is easy.  Two is easy.  Four is pretty hard, but do-able.  In November I did six laps at 9:07.  There's a 3.1 mile, slightly hilly course in our neighborhood that I did in 20:55 in December.  After Holiday Bloat my best time for the neighborhood was 21:25.

(For comparison, top high school boys run this distance in 14 minutes.  In theory, we'd be coming in four whole minutes after those guys.  That's not too ambitious, is it?  Top area high school girls run it in 17 minutes, and sometimes 16 minutes.  We're shooting for two minutes after them.)

 My friend was having a hard time finding a track up in Denver, where he said the schools gate and lock them.  He eventually found one, the existence of which he heard about from a neighbor who had a friend who had a key.  Seriously, something like that.  We don't have that kind of track security here.  Anyway, I can assume he's running at least a 20-minute-something three miles right now.  So that's two-plus minutes that we've got to shave.  Something like 42 seconds off each mile.  10.5 seconds off each lap.  We originally said we'd need till Christmas 2010.  Obviously we need more time.

Jean might ask, How much more time do you not need? 

Quick Monday Update

Dust off the nickname.

WK must had forty points tonight on 50% shooting.  The full repertoire of open threes and hand-in-his-face circus bombs.  Just silly shooting all night.  Mostly swishes, from incredible distances.  A number of nice layups too. 

Despite his efforts, we lost 101-71.  We could have played better, but not by much.   Our opponents were massive and fast.  And skilled.  And young.  Except for two of them, they all looked like they worked out with weights.  The kind of guys you have to foul every time in the paint, relying on the referee to miss some calls.  Thanks to great shooting from everybody, we hung with them for a while.  We got up 14-4, but then fell behind 40-36 late in the first half.  They managed to make it a ten-point margin by intermission.

By mid-second half it seemed that for every basket of ours, they put in two.  Still, it was fun.  And, as Jeff said on the ride home, playing a team like that can only make us better.  

 

League Play

Last Monday night I picked up my friend Jeff down the street before our first game of a ten-game season organized by the city's Parks and Recreation department.  I talked to his wife and mother-in-law and 18-month-old son for several minutes in the kitchen while he put on his gear, which included his blindingly white, freshly purchased high tops.  His wife asked if we wanted anything to eat before we left, and we said No thank you.  They said Have fun and Be safe and then we ran through the rain to my idling car.  The youth-restoring properties of Grecian Formula or Rogaine cannot compete with the potency of such moments.

We arrived at the Dove Springs Recreation center at 6:45.  In the front lobby kids played Ping-Pong, watched television, and chased each other near the vending machines, and from the back echoed the telltale booming and squeaking of a gymnasium.  That noise quickens the pulse.    Gotta get out there, gotta gotta do some figure eights, gotta touch my toes.

Our team was in force.  Everybody greeted each other as if we hadn't just all played together the previous morning.  "Tim!  What's happening!"  "That's what I'm saying Gil!"  "Let's do this!"  "Joey, how ya doing!"  Naturally spirits run high before competitive action; add to this the Uniform Effect (like the Tux Effect or the middle-school-kid Tie Effect) and watch your head-bobbing, manic grinning, and positive mutual appraisal triple in magnitude.   

One referee was running late, so we had sufficient time to acquaint ourselves with the forgiving, single rims and the dynamics of the swept polyurethane floor.  Eventually it was determined that the other official would not  be coming, so the clock counted down from three minutes to tipoff.  I spent them feeding White Kobe, who was draining from around the arc.  In fact, he went around the world and back without a miss, and some kids on the risers were exclaiming their wonder.  He sunk no less than 12 shots in a row, concluding with a corner three as the buzzer sounded.

White Kobe's warm-up clinic seemed to betoken good things to come, as he drained his first two shots of the game, including a signature deep three.  (By the way, we were playing a team of UT seniors, one of whom was a former high school student of mine.  Incidentally, he appeared skinnier and less imposing than he did when he was 17, when he could dunk.)  Quickly, however, we fell behind by 10, and after the first twenty-minute half, we were down 20-10. 

The college seniors looked and played rather ordinarily, and featured no superior figure.  No lightning quick dude.  No lights out shooter.  No real driver.  We stole the ball from them three times in the first half, but converted on few possessions, obviously.  As for White Kobe, he didn't hit another three for the reminder of the game, but not for lack of trying.  Seriously, I'm going to refer to him as Daniel now; I cannot in good conscience use the Kobe comparison after the brick house he built on Monday.  (We played this morning when of course he was on fire, and Mando was the one to say it:  "Hey, Daniel, where was that on Monday?")  I'll gladly bring his moniker back once he's made me forget this debacle.

So we lost  50-30.  Outplayed in every respect.  Jeff and I were spelling each other every 3 minutes, which was fun.  Work as hard as you can for 180 seconds, then sit for 180.  During one of my stints, I scored twice and got a few rebounds, and I heard Jeff say "Stay out there!" but I was too spent and yelled at him to get in for me.  So much for youthful surges.  The next time out there I airballed an 8 footer.

After the game the consensus sentiment was that we were merely tired from our Sunday morning game, and we'd adjust, surely.  Not that we'd temporarily cancel our Sunday morning game.  No, we couldn't have that.  That's when we play well.  That's our time to shine.  If anything, we need Sunday so that the magic might carry over into League Play. 

Out in the dark parking lot we were already talking about the next game. 

Next game, we'll have Brian back.  

Hey, we played a lot better once we went to man-to-man.  

Everybody had an off night, man.  

We can totally compete with those guys.    

We hopped in our cars and drove off.  Bring on Monday.  

(Well, first Sunday.  Then Monday.)

Free Throws

Check this out.

 

 

Sunday Recap III

It's August in central Texas.  We finally punched through the 100 degree barrier last week, which is way behind schedule. 

Last Sunday something unique happened.  It's 10-8, we're playing to 12, some guys have left by now, so this fifth game is reduced to four-on-four.  It's about noon, and the sun is obnoxiously oppressive.  The concrete, the sky, the backboards - everything glares.  We're a basket or two from finishing.  After both teams miss, we come back down the court trying to tie it up, when suddenly, in a matter of seconds, everybody wanders into the shade.  It was a nearly silent exodus.  My guy, Tim, mumbled, "I need water" as he staggered into the wooded area, and I wordlessly followed him.  The next thing I knew all eight of us were sitting down.  There was no "is that it, or is this a break?" discussion.  Simply over.  After resting for a few minutes, we found the energy to laugh about this unprecedented manner of concluding our game.

We might have lost that one.  We lost the previous three.  We did not, however, lose the first one.  I knew that the first one, while it was happening, was going to be blogworthy.  When I say "we" I'm talking about five of us who have been together since 2005.  And when I say "they" I'm talking about five of the younger guys.  The game started as 4-on-4, but with the score tied at four baskets apiece, we each picked up a guy, and started over at zeroes.  We naturally picked up Brian, and they naturally picked up White Kobe.

Well, we won handily, 12-4.  When Randy spotted up and drilled a two pointer to make it 7-2, I knew this game was going to be special.  What distinguished this win from other wins against the young guys is that our team was not the tallest configuration that we might have assembled, nor the fastest, nor the one with the best ball-handling skills.   In contrast, the young guys had about the best five that Young Guy pool could have fielded, in my opinion.  But what we had, as Norman Dale says, was each man playing to his potential.   We finished fast breaks, hit twos, pounded them inside, and made them miss. Gil, Mando, Randy, me, Brian: a moment to cherish preserved in time.

We did lose the next three, like I said.  And nobody really cares about losing the first game, especially if you manage to win the rest. But it happened nonetheless, and when it happened it was poetry in sweltering motion. 

By the end of summer

It's summertime, June 5th.  Hot the eye of heaven shines.  Played ones at 95° yesterday with Steven, a recent high school graduate.  He'd lost a step since we'd last played, in October, just prior to his varsity season.  I said as much as we sat in the shade, and hoped he wasn't offended.  When I got on my bike to go home, he said, "I want to beat you by the end of the summer."  And boom just like that was TEBO replenished with material.

By the end of the summer.  A distinct time, evocative of final swims and nighttime sweatshirts.  Right now, however, we are on summer's threshold, chapter 1, the foothills.  Like all summers, this one is full of potential.  Squinting at yonder majestic bluffs, do I see Little J using a kickboard?  Is that RoJo wiggling, wiggling, and turning over?  And there, out in July, in that UK wedding, can you see a two-year-old flower girl?  Does she move in a forwardly fashion or is she a stone at the top of the aisle?  I see a 50th wedding anniversary party, too, and my question is, just how late is that one going?  It looks well past midnight to me.  

By the end of the summer, we'll know the NBA champions, the Wimbledon and French Open winners, and we'll have an idea about who'll be competing for the MLB pennant.  Beyond sports, hopefully we'll know how the BP oil disaster was finally contained.  However, we likely will not know any more about when and how our two wars will end.  Like David Cross said in a 2002,  "At no point in time, ever, are we gonna go, 'Whew!  Got 'em all!  Everybody loves us again!'" Stand-up comedy paints in broad strokes, but I think the philosophy of that line is worthy of contemplation.

By the end of summer, people often change.  For a few of my friends, the summer of 9th grade was like an episode of Wonder Years, featuring enough family chernobyls, alcohol epiphanies, and forays into frenching to keep Kevin Arnold's eyebrow arched for perpetuity.  As for me, there were no milestones that summer, unless you count the time I got shot in the knee with a paint-ball outside Mills Pharmacy. That was a new experience.  Wait, scratch that.  Of course there was a milestone.  That summer my dad and I hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.  Four miles down, and then, the next morning, eight miles back up.  We were so spent we took a 3 hour nap upon reaching our lodge on the rim.  Later that summer, back home, in a darkened basement, as the murmurings and rustlings of my friend and his new girlfriend kept me from properly hearing the dialogue of Die Hard, I found refuge, pride, and strength in the recollection of our accomplishment out there in Arizona. 

Two days ago I experienced an update on the summer-changes-people theme.  I called a friend's house to see if he and his kids wanted to swim the next day, and his wife told me, "Don't you know that he doesn't live here anymore?"  I don't stutter, but I did when she told me that.  Whoa.  Talk about jarring.  I called Jessica at work immediately after to tell her what I'd just found out, as well as to get back to a reality I knew.  Just barely broached it with him when he came over.  The little bit I found out is that he expects to be divorced by....the end of summer.

Thoughts now turn to the opening paragraph of Natalie Babbit's Tuck Everlasting:

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.

Hmmmm.  A glaring noon in August sounds like a likely time to lose to Steven.  I'll have to prepare against that.

    

Fouls, Cheetahs, No Delete Key

It's a Monday morning, it's been a few weeks, let's try something where I do not use the delete key except to correct a spelling mistake.  Starting now.

By the way, this is intended to be a stimulus to write, this method.  Just get it out of your head.  Might have used quotation marks around that last one.

Played hoops yesterday.  Good sentence.  Guys were a little testy, or rather the games were a little chippy.  Let's make a catalogue of events:  in backwards order, the games ended on a massive score dispute involving Mando and the same young guy I had a score dispute with last fall.  I was packing up to go and was not playing in that game, so wasn't certain how it started, but they were yelling like they were at Omaha Beach.  Something to do with whether the game was to go to 11 or 12 points, and it eventually simmered down as it was established that we always play to just 11.

Before that there was some sideline razzing of one of our guys who called a foul on a defender even though it's true that our guy was the one throwing his shoulders around.  

Before that I had to tell White Kobe in what amounted to new territory for our relationship to "watch (himself) down there" after he used my back and shoulders as a springboard to put a miss back in.  Last fall he did that once and acknowledged it, but this time he was running back down the court while my teammate Gil just looked at me and I was thinking Hang On, What just happened there?  It was one of those deals where somebody missed from outside, I'm underneath ready to jump, and suddenly somebody's putting it back in and I'm not even getting off the ground.  He probably did have great timing, and when you're the guy that's timed it right, it's true it makes everyone else look like prisoners of gravity.  Still, Gil's look told me that it wasn't quite kosher.  So anyway White Kobe merely said "Yeah okay" in an ambiguous way which fairly pissed me off.  So here's where it gets good.  We're down 10-8 after his dubious put-back, he says Yeah Ok, I drive and dish to somebody, pop back out, catch a pass just inside the arc, step back outside the arc and make it 10-10.  They come down and miss, we come down and make and win.  Never done the step-back three before.  Billy my brother-in-law owns that move. Hop back and make a three.  So we say good game afterwards and that's that.  Gil, by the way, was the centerpiece of our win, dong everything that he's known for.  So I've lost a little respect for WK now because you gotta know when you do that.  Afterwards Gil said there was no doubt.  Of course in pick-up ball it's on the fouled to call the foul, but I'd already called a contended foul earlier that game, which brings us to the first incident...

Where I called a foul on a guy who stripped it from me as I was passing it, and his response was "that was ball first, then arm!" but I didn't say boo and he gave it back and said my name a few times in exasperation and a few more "ball first, that was ball first!" and then that was that.  Well, except that this did influence me to not demand a re-do of Kobe's possession later in the game.  I don't want to cross over into complainer status, but the truth is also that I also don't like confrontation for the obvious reasons: it's stressful, it causes upset, and I don't have a third reason.  I like to think of myself as Guy who doesn't call fouls because he doesn't need to and usually people call themselves out when they foul me, but I have to admit that I'm also Guy who's unwilling to rankle others twice in a game, even if it's justified.  Must ask self also: am I intimidated by WK?  For instance, would I have called out somebody else on that?  The problem is, the guys I would have called out actually would have called themselves out to start with.  And while it's true that the game unfolded from there ideally, with us winning, and my irritation transmuted into triumph, that sidesteps the issue of "why wouldn't you demand a re-do?"

I've lost my temper a few times over the years, with strangers and friends on the court, but not with, I realize now, an Alpha-dog like WK.  So this session of navel-gazing here has led me to conclude that this was a case of animal-like deference, my "watch yourself down there" amounting to a lesser-cheetah's feint before loping away.  Although the winning the game part would be like winning a cheetah sprint to nab the springbok anyway.  Of course, the springbok won't always be available that way, and challenging the alpha cheetah will more often than not be the way to it.  Must remember that.  Must go now.  Must go eat Savanna-Flakes. 

The year she made contact

Anchors

Wikipedia informs us that we laugh to relieve tension and "physic energy."  In this case, then, I'd say that the tension we experience here is the result of our empathy for Collins and Fisher.  We identify with them, and release the discomfort through laughter.  Who has not had prolonged agonizing moments in the spotlight like this?  

* One time I hit four different kids with pitches over just a few innings in a Little League game.  Each was more humiliating than the previous.  The way I remember it, parents in the bleachers started murmuring after the second one.  After the fourth downed batter I was mercifully pulled out.  At the time, this did not seem funny.  I'm sure I laughed about it with the team later that season.

* At a job fair once, a principal asked me asked me what my 4th-grade reading program looked like.  I just kept saying the word "books."  I started out in Spanish (she wanted to see my proficiency), saying, "My reading program  is....Well, so we have books...I mean of course we have books, ha-ha....I mean, I choose a book for the class...and we have a different...different books, I mean...I mean, so..." and she said "go ahead and tell me in English" and that made no difference. Zip.  I said the same thing, with even more stammering.  The truth was, I hadn't prepared a way to explain my reading-class methods.  I didn't have a method.  If I did, it was: read a short story each day from the primer and then after lunch another chapter from our novel, and let's make notes of the challenging words/good turns of phrase, and now here's some questions of varying difficulty that I wrote this morning before school that make you go back to the text, and now let's explain in a paragraph how the kid from My Side of the Mountain is different from what we know so far about the kids hiding out in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, and yes, John, that's true, isn't it, most of our books do have to do with somebody running away.  

Now, had I just said that to the principal, it wouldn't have been too uncomfortable, but instead there was an Annie Hall-like conversation of subtitles running beneath whatever I was saying about "books" and it went like this: 

"We will not hire you."  

"I know. Let me say 'books' again though."  

"Okay, but only one more time, because the woman behind you in line look like a real candidate for this job."  

Afterwards, I went to the corner of the gymnasium where the "psychic energy" poured forth like a geyser.  Then I took a second and prepared an answer should somebody ask me this again. 

Other examples of tension-relieving laughter:

* Little J screaming and cracking up during a game of peak-a-boo.

* The collective tittering and exhaling following a fright in a suspenseful movie.

*  The way some high-school kids have a hard time keeping composure during any kind of project presentation.

Wikipedia also has this to say about laughter:

For example, this is how this theory works in the case of humor: a joke creates an inconsistency, the sentence appears to be not relevant, and we automatically try to understand what the sentence says, supposes, doesn't say, and implies; if we are successful in solving this 'cognitive riddle', and we find out what is hidden within the sentence, and what is the underlying thought, and we bring foreground what was in the background, and we realize that the surprise wasn't dangerous, we eventually laugh with relief.

This - the inconsistency, the idea of the undangerous surprise - makes me think immediately of the popular and hilarious "Shreds" videos, in which well-regarded musicians appear to be playing spectacularly poorly.  The surprise is that these great musicians sound terrible, and it's ultimately "undangerous" because we realize it's not real.  

Let's close with this one.  Tell me, do you think the wiki-explanation of the laugh mechanism applies here?  I do:

 

Sunday Recap: March edition

Indoor game today.   As it was breezy and chilly this morning, Mando opened the gym for us.  The advantages of indoor fives include: no wind, no sun in your eyes, and no tight double rims.  The disadvantages are: exerting oneself out-of-doors is its own pleasure, and there's some slippage on a gym floor.  Unless it is swept thoroughly, a wood surface is less responsive than concrete.  The court was by no means dusty, but you notice those fractions of seconds and inches.

However, the comparatively soft rims were nice.  Their presence coincided with solid all-around shooting from everybody.  Throughout the morning, Gil drained a bevy of threes, Randy and Rick were swishing j's, and even I filled two bombs.   On my team was White Kobe, who scored the lion's share of points as we won the final five games.  As I've said, he's a scoring machine, a jumper-hitting automaton.  Seldom drives, seldom posts up.  Just catch and shoot.  It can be disconcerting, because I'm making a cut, look up, see him firing up a corner trey with Brian all over him and I'm thinking, "Is he really taking that sho---nice!"  The thing is, when you're playing with someone like that - a legitimate shooter -  just feed him, know your role, and it'll all come together.  He'll find you on a double team.  Our last game went to twenty, and it featured a scintillating duel between him and Brian.  As Kobe hit successive hand-in-his-face jumpers, Brian pounded him down low for hook after hook after hook.  As for me, nothing special defensively today.  In fact, I caught myself not contesting some of Gil's treys, just watched them unfold like a theatergoer gazing upon a developing scene.  Ah, this is where he spots up and, well look at that! Pass the Raisinettes!  As per the trend lately, most of my points came on layups, although I swished a jumper to win the final game.  That felt pretty sweet. 

With a new baby due any moment now, you'd think that practice time would shrink.  But that's why I bought a Little Tykes rim at a garage sale ($3) yesterday, as well as a Snow White-themed ball from the Walgreens ball-bin twenty minutes later.  Sure, it's ostensibly for Little J, but while I'm working with her on her reverse layup and free throws, I'll be getting my reps in, rest assured.  Those little balls are actually harder to control, so if you can dribble that, you can dribble anything.  When we presented it to her after naptime, she immediately put on a one-girl dunk contest.  "Jean's do, Jean's do, Jean's doing basketbaaaaaaaalll."  If she will stick with the sport is unknown, but as I observed her catch a pass from her mom on the couch, a flash came to me, a vision of the year 2023 and a high school player nicknamed...LaBlonde J.