Laughing out loud at the basketball game

You are too beautiful to be everywhere, but still you are everywhere. You are right beside me, I vaguely remember, as I am catching the bus at the bottom of the hill near the high school. And I feel your presence especially as I am getting into trouble for laughing out loud at the basketball game, for which you thought I was especially dumb. I try not to speak to you, or look at you for that matter, because you are so beautiful it hurts.

Family matters. It really does.

Mother and I are at Zilker park, watching Frazier and some other guys play some combination sport, which mixes basketball (dribbling), soccer (kicking, heading) and football (endzones, touchdowns). I want to play and think I could fit in, as there are only three or four players at this point, but I have forgotten my athletic shoes. I didn't know there would be a fun game to join when I decided to go to the park. I didn't know friends would be there.

I am not sure which shoes I am wearing, but they are inappropriate, this is certain. Lying in the grass next to me is my older pair of cognac-tinted dress shoes. These will not work. I beg my mother to take me back home to get some appropriate footwear, but she insists on staying. I beg then to take her car, but she will not let me. I berate her as I would have as a teenager. It reminds me of the time we had teriyaki chicken and rice for dinner. She and my father would not let me go to the fair with my girlfriend. I must have stormed upstairs and told them they would be sorry someday.

Like in my adolescent arguments, she does not give in and I berate her further. "You're the one that always tells me if I don't want to be so depressed I ought to start exercising. Now I have the chance and you say no. You don't even care," I scream to her.

She begins to cry and I think I feel sorry.

And then at some point much darker in the day, I look up to find dozens of people playing this sport. I enter the field of play and ask if I can join, explaining that there is an odd number of people on the field and that I know Frazier well, but my audience does not respond with much, and what I do get it cold and despondent.

***

Memphis Pencils play a local version of CMJ in a movie theater. Eric Jensen is the emcee. Yani is in the crowd. I spend time on stage and in the crowd, studying the schedule to find that we are the best act at the festival.

***

I am with Maw Maw and my mother, watching an old film of the two of them and Paw Paw, the grandfather of whom everyone seems to think I am the reincarnation. They all look so young at this enormous banquet celebrating something like a wedding. Maw Maw is on stage, singing a song I think, and looks just like Aunt Sandra. Paw Paw takes his turn and looks just like me. They are so young, all of them.

I am then with Lois at the house on Ascension, in the living room. Upon my request we look at some old photos. At first Mimi just gives me a sheet of white paper with faded, black and white photos of my father as a child. I can barely make them out. Then she hands me a sheet of negatives. I hold it up to the light and can make things out a bit clearer. Each new sheet contains more recent photos. Then comes a book of photos of my father's baseball days. His face in the photo morphs in and out of mine, as if sometimes we are the same person.

***

My mother's side of the family and mine are gathered at my parents' house on Lafayette for Christmas dinner. Paul Rawlings is there too. Things are going well. Cousin Eron plays guitar while Mariana sings the words to some combination of Hank Williams' "There's A Tear In My Beer" and "Hey Good Lookin'." We are all so impressed that this five year old can read, and even more so that she knows the melodies of Hank Williams, her father's namesake.

Soon my father and I get into an argument, the content of which is not clear, the intensity of which is apparent to everyone. There is no dining room table. I take a break from the argument to get a beer from the refrigerator. It's slim pickins, just one bud light on the top shelf, which is for my mother, and some nasty stuff on the bottom. Paul is in the kitchen with me. He seems confused that I'd be drinking at a family gathering. For some reason this is not even acceptable in dreams.

I go back to the living room where my father and I continue our spat. We begin wrestling in a manner which I find no more than playful, but he seems to take it quite seriously, as does the rest of the family. My glasses are broken, probably in the process, and though he has fixed them once before, he says something to the effect of "Well, that's your problem."

"Then I guess I just won't have glasses," I counter.

***

My mother and I are watching a mystery unfold on CBS. We know not what is going on nor whether it is fact or fiction, nor whether it is documentary or dramatization. But we are perceptive enough to see that it is strange.

***

I haven't done anything...

I didn't seem too shocked to be back in school. Even the elementary configuration wasn't too startling and those old, rickety desks from the years of times tables and spelling contests were less than impressive. Someone resembling Mrs. Lilquist from my Washington Elementary days was presiding and a semblance of Maggie Bates sat somewhere near me. I sat in a desk, enormous chalkboard ahead and vast, blindless windows to my left, as the announcement of an exam came. It was no surprise to my classmates, most of whom I had been oblivious to until the news came, that we would be taking an exam about a Jane Austen novel, which we had had the entire vacation to get to know. I began to worry when I saw the stack of paper placed somewhat neatly atop an empty desk in the center of the room. The exams were alternately neon blue, pink and yellow, and I excused myself from the classroom after confessing to a classmate that I had "not done anything."

I made my way through the distorted streets of Fayetteville near the university.

In what was my bedroom for many years, Sara Miller waited on me as I gathered my things, mostly clothes, for our journey to her house. It was important what I chose to take with me because I was eventually to participate in a boxing match. At Caitlin Briggs' house down the street we discussed whether or not we would walk the couple of blocks up the hill to her mother's house. I was in favor, she opposed because it was raining. My persuasion almost brought her to tears. A few shadowy figures appeared outside of the glass pane, which constituted the entirety of the home's facade. One of them was Chris Byrne and I joyfully called out his name: "Gangster!" He entered the house, gliding in without using any door or breaking any glass. We shook hands the informal way and reveled in the fact that we were seeing each other for the first time in ages. I gleaned the dark corner across the street.

My breath really does smell pretty deathy.

It all started on TV. Mike Conley was playing for some Laker-colored basketball team most of whose members had ridiculous mohawks. Mike didn't though. And he wasn't wearing their jersey either, now that I think of it, so maybe he was on the other team. Way to go, Mike. Beat those stupid haircuts.
The jersey I was wearing was from my first year playing basketball with the Washington Wildcats, one of those reversible bits. I was wearing it with the white side and not the blue side showing. It was so tight that when I decided to take it off I had to get help from my father. I was quite grateful until he told me, at a volume audible to every person near, that my breath smelled horrible. And so I played the angry pout.
I couldn't understand why there were no instructions further than "Write about the Civil War." I couldn't get an explanation from anyone and time was winding down and I couldn't decide just what to write about and WHY CAN'T I BE ASSIGNED A MORE SPECIFIC TOPIC? "Surely I will fail," I thought, mesmerized by the scoreboard.
On our way out, my father and I ran into a rather cheery Yani. She needed a ride and my father more or less ignored her. We were the ones giving her a ride, but she led us to our car, which wasn't quite ours. It was an old Subaru-looking piece. She got in. And so it ended right there, Yani, in the car my father was supposed to drive, and I, standing outside wondering where the car came from, wondering where any of it came from.