Sherman,
Long ago I adopted you as my favorite writer. My parents were artists, and their merry band would often cross over the tracks and end up on our porch in the wee hours discussing art and writing and poetry and love and death. Once a month a formal group of poets from the University would meet on our porch and talk similarly into the wee hours about art and writing and poetry and love and death. My bedroom window looked out on the porch. I slept by the window.
Somehow the "Business of Fancydancing" made onto my shelf, and into my heart. You have been there ever since.
See as kids we played basketball too. We played basketball because it kept us away from the sharper parts of the meat grinder we lived in. It was safety in numbers and shared experience. Nervous energy was a byproduct of the confrontation filled society we inhabited. It gave us a place to let it out, without having to worry about it coming back at us with a knife. There were three escapes: Mom, Art and Basketball. I embraced all three.
The kids on our court were not there to make it onto any team other than the one that assembled daily. This was Flint Michigan in the mid Eighties. Athletic talent was off the charts. But this is a love letter so I won't bore you with any theory. Needless to say Flint had game.
There were two main struggles on our court, the weather and the lack of a net. Flint is cold in winter, and it basically rains all the time. I live in the Northwest now, and only recently recovered the suppressed memory of those many cloud covered years dodging an acid filled rain, not to mention the god like storms of summer.
If it wasn't too cold or too wet, we played basketball, year round. The lack of net was much more of a problem. There was never a net, a cruel metaphor and a compromised basketball experience. Every now and then the kind soul of some street basketball angel would hang one up... it rarely made it through the night.
The day after we graduated from high school my best friend and I got into a car and drove to the West Coast. After a week or so of traveling we ended up in the Bay Area, two unbound horses charging out of a world we knew too well and were trying to forget and into one we knew nothing about and had the rest of our lives to discover.
The day after we arrived, we went out and played basketball. I remember that day vividly, as do you. I can see the arc of that very ball and the clear blue of that very sky. There we were, playing basketball, but not in the rotting belly of a slain industrial giant... in sunshine and clean air. And that was something.