Bounce

My son, a second grader, was practicing dribbling a basketball through his legs yesterday, from his left hand to his right, something he no doubt picked up at school or from seeing at a high school basketball game.  I didn't stop him; in fact, at one point I asked him to try going from his right hand--his strong hand since he's left handed--to his left.  After all, it's never too early to work on your weak hand.

I came to love basketball not from my dad, who loved all sports responsibly, as a way to be active and part of something communal.  He played catch with us, taught us to hit; the only time I remember him shooting a basketball was when he showed us how to shoot a freethrow--underhanded, which also showed just what boat he got off of:  Noah's. 

No, I came to love basketball from the pageantry of high school sports, the impetus put on it by an entire community, the wonder of tournament games on the radio announced over scratchy microphones, the frenzy of a live game-winning shot that drowned my own voice and made me cover my ears. I loved it because I heard the older boys talking about the Los Angeles Lakers and then I watched the Lakers perform legerdemain with a basketball on Sunday afternoons and cheered for them as if my life depended on it.  Then I got a Nerfhoop and I was the Lakers and I scored 100 points a game and earned the adoration of imagined crowds and whatever current imagined girlfriend, too.

And so I can't say that I loved basketball in its own right; there was definitely a cultural context that predisposed me to it. 

But I also began to critique it fairly early on.  I didn't do well under pressure, even imagined seventh grade pressure, when I tried to write a story about inner city ballers who were friends but also rivals, characters lightly disguised for me and a friend of mine.  In high school I also critiqued it some, trying to take the bigger perspective that basketball wasn't all there was in life.  Though undefeated my junior year, we ended up losing in the district semifinals.  I'm not sure self-consciousness on the issue really helped anything.

Upon graduating, I went off to play at Bethel College, even started a few games my junior year, then forewent the basketball season in order to go on the England Term program my senior year, where I really sold myself to literature and writing, my major.  This is how "sold" I was:  at one point on the bus, no doubt beset by a certain subconscious homesickness, I had the most intense flashback to a basketball game from the year before.  At that moment I would have traded the whole England Term experience--really a transformative time in my life--to go back and give hoops one more shot.

Now, our family goes to high school basketball games and my son and his friends idolize the players.  The cultural context from when I grew up is largely the same.  It scares me: I want him to be well-rounded, don't want him to get caught in the smallness of the sport, don't want him in that particular small town rut.  And yet I want him to belong to a place, and in this place basketball continues to play a significant role.  And yet, as an insider of sorts, I also find myself wanting to teach him the game; I want to teach him a pretty J, wouldn't mind if he'd become a natural impresario off the dribble, a beautiful skill I never came close to. 

Oh, boy.  Even in my rhetoric, I betray myself.  "An impresario off the dribble?"  "I"?  Who or what is this about? 

There are a million traps in parenting it seems to me lately.  My children are fixated on video games, on obtaining personal hand held devices.  At a basketball game recently, I found my youngest son sequestered in the farthest corner of the lobby, playing a game on the phone of a complete stranger--a high school fan from the other team.  My daughter, 11, dreams of having an iPod touch and the other day asked out of the blue, "Can I have a TV in my room?"

High school sports can be an idol, I know; but the other ruts that are forming in our lives are just as deep and feel even more dangerous and seem to be part of the larger rut that builds itself in our lives: American middle class insularity. 

All my life, it seems, I've been trying to avoid staidness, insularity.  For many of my first 18 years, I made sure everyone knew I was headed for Someplace:  the city.  Then, I went to college in a suburb and wanted out of suburbia;  I returned "home" to teach but often encouraged small town kids to leave for college.  For the last four years my wife and I have had our sights set on moving to Worthington where she works, a small community with an absolutely crazy level of diversity, telling ourselves that the diversity of the place would somehow save us, would push us beyond the boundaries that form in our even smaller community. 

Yesterday, after four years, I took the for sale signs down outside our house. 

Today was black and gold day in the local Christian grade school, in anticipation of the section championship tonight, and so I dug out my high school warm up jersey and sent my son to school in it. 

And so the rut deepens. 

Perhaps ruts are inevitable, but I'm American enough to think I can buck them--until this point, by leaving for Somewhere Else.

But now, with the signs down and the ruts getting deeper every day, perhaps discipleship really begins in earnest.  In my staid life, what does the gospel mean?  In American middle class insularity, how does one truly follow the narrative of scripture?  How does one live out a biblical faith of "faithful improvisation"?  And what part, pray tell, might a crossover, through-the-legs-dribble play in all of this?

Perhaps only this:  it's never to late to work on my weak hand.