By the time Riley, Evie, and I arrived, right after the junior varsity game had ended, the gym was packed to the gills. We walked up and back one side, looking around for some place to sit, and then, having had no luck, we walked over to the other side.
Finally found a spot in the front row near the hoop on the north end of the gym. Squeezed in, and they handed me their jackets, asked me to hold on to them.
We settled in and I looked up at the scoreboard clock, still almost ten minutes until tipoff.
Looked out on to the court, and saw my son, my oldest, standing near the half court line, dropping low fives to his teammates as they made their way up the lay-up line.
He looked miserable.
His season is over, a second knee surgery staring him in the face a week from now. Another torn patellar tendon, this time in the left knee. Last year it was the right knee. The orthopedist says he has some sort of genetic anomaly; the bone where that tendon sits on its way to holding the kneecap in place should be concave, but Bailey’s is flat on both sides, and the flatness of that bone makes him more vulnerable to that particular injury. A couple of weeks ago, in practice, he came down with a rebound, landing with all his weight on the left leg, and felt the kneecap pop out of place.
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When he was really young he used to dream about playing in college someday, he would say, I’m gonna be taller than you someday, Dad, you're six-four and Mom was five-nine, I'm gonna be tall, I’m gonna be six-seven.
I remember how weird it felt when I outgrew my own father, and I wondered if Bailey really ever would outgrow me, and the years went by, and he grew little by little, and one day I woke up and it seemed he had caught me, and then I woke up the next day and realized I was looking up at him.
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I stood in the kitchen on Thursday night, putting some dishes away, Evie and Riley in there with me, arguing about something. Sheila was upstairs, putting Sophie to bed. Bailey came in with a piece of paper.
“Here’s my PSAT scores, Dad,” he said. “They’re not too good. I guess I’m not gonna get in to college.”
I took the paper from his hand, expecting to see abysmal scores.
“Oh, what Dad, did Bailey bomb his tests? Now he can’t go to college?” Evie asked.
I was pleasantly surprised. While the scores weren’t exactly stellar, they weren’t THAT bad.
“Bailey you took this test with no prep. I’ll get you a prep book, we’ll work on it, you got a few months before you have to take the tests for real. There’s no reason you can’t get these up to perfectly fine. And schools look at more than your SATs, I know that, I work at a college, you know.”
Yes, I do. I work at a college that’s part of a tuition exchange program. And they’re going to have to physically throw me out of the place to get rid of me. I’ve never made much money in my life, I went from working in progressive politics to being a stay-at-home Dad to this job. I’ll lick the bathroom floors clean with my tongue if that’s what I gotta do to hold on to that benefit.
“I can’t get into your school.”
“It’s probably not the right place for you. You need something different. There’s plenty of schools out there.”
“I want to go to your school, Dad,” Evie piped up.
If she keeps going the way she is, I thought, she’ll get in to almost any school in the country.
“Keep doing what you’re doing,” I said. “You’ll be fine.”
“Dad?” asked Riley.
“Yeah?”
“Well I don’t want you to be mad but I don’t think I want to go to your school.”
“That’s OK.”
“I mean I like it, but I wanna get to the NBA and no one from your school ever goes to the NBA.”
“Riley, you’re not going to the NBA,” Bailey interjected.
“You don’t know that!”
“Uh, yes I do. You’re not going to the NBA, there’s only like a few hundred guys in the NBA out of like millions of kids who play.”
“So what, you don’t know that, I could go to the NBA.”
He starts dribbling his little Knicks ball around the kitchen floor.
“Dad, do YOU think I could make it to the NBA?”
“Well, it’s not easy, but you’re young, who knows what can happen.”
“See Bailey, I CAN make it to the NBA!”
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The game starts, the gym’s raucous, two rival schools going at it, Bailey’s team starts out hot, gets a nice early lead, but the other side comes back, it goes back and forth, and then they slowly start to pull away. We’re sitting opposite the other team’s student section and they are whooping it up. Riley silently clings to my side, while Evie stands and yells stuff back at the other side’s fans. I have noticed that, like her father and grandfather before her, she is fiercely competitive. And, since I know none of my children will read this, I will also say that she is the most purely athletic of them; tall, wiry, long-limbed, and extremely well-coordinated.
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I look across the court now and then to catch glimpses of Bailey on the bench. He seems into the game, probably forgetting, for a while, what’s in store next week. His team, down twelve in the third quarter, chips away bit by bit, getting the deficit down to nine, then, into the fourth quarter, down to seven, then five, then three, then one, and then, with the clock winding down, they tie it.
They stop the other team with a few seconds left in the game, get the ball back, try to run a play, it goes haywire, they nearly throw the ball away, then get it back, and then their best player throws up a desperation twenty-five footer. It looks ugly at first, his feet going in different directions as he gets up into the air, the shot a sort of line drive, not the classically high, soft arc you’d want to see, but, from my vantage point from the opposite side of the gym, I can see almost instantly that it’s going to go in, so my eyes leave the flight of the ball and find my son, now standing.
I can see his big cornflower blue eyes, oh, he’s got his mother's eyes, and I can see those eyes get wide, his arms go up in the air. I can feel Riley’s hands grabbing my arm, my eyes go back to the flight of the ball, all my years of watching and playing ball telling me, yeah, this is going in, and then the ball hits nothing but net, and my eyes run back to my son, I see him limping onto the court, joining his teammates as they swarm the kid who hit the game winning shot.
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Later on, he comes home, and, as Sheila and Sophie sleep, we watch the news, Bailey sees himself running out onto the court, and we all laugh and he says, ah Dad, that was so fun, I’ll never forget it, even if I don’t make the team next year I’ll always have tonight.
Of course, I want more than that for him.
As he’s outgrown me, as the date of his departure grows ever closer, I worry about him. He’s struggled, with school, with anxiety, with his weight, with the death of his mother. I feel sick about the pain he’ll be going through next week at this time. I feel sick at the thought of him somewhere away from home, trying to do the right thing.
Reality is settling in. He knows he’s not going to the NBA, he knows he's not going to play in college, he knows his own limitations mean there's doors that won't open for him.
I know he’s lucky, and that I’m lucky; we could be have far deeper problems on our hands. But still, as the end of his childhood comes so clearly into view, I worry about him. I want his surgery to go well. I want him to do well enough on those tests in the fall. I want him to make the basketball team next fall, knowing how much it means to him. I want him to find a school, I want him to find true love, I want him to grow up and find a place in this world.
And I know that, unlike the days when I could tell him it was time for bed, I can’t will any of this to happen. It will, or it won’t, and, after all these years of being in charge, I’m just trying to accept the fact that my son’s fate will soon slip through my hands.