At first a dribble thuds. In virgin care, the basketball is a foreign object that seems more square than it is round. But fingertips learn fast. A symbiotic relationship forms in the crouched rat-a-tat-tat of repetition where handlers recognize early, the give of supple leather separated by predictable seams. The ball teaches you how to bounce it, if you hang out with it enough.

Just a few days after the glittery New Year’s Eve ball dropped as everybody was lacing-up their tennis shoes and heading to work out, I overheard a stranger say that she’d made it all the way through 2024 without buying any clothes. Three-hundred-sixty-five days without an apparel purchase. Impressive. Not a pair of socks. Not a sports bra. Not a trendy jacket or a pair of jeans. 

All the plexiglass goals in the gym had been swung up by their mechanical arms toward the rafters, their nets hanging sideways, still, closed for business for the day.

Happy New Year!!! The blog will return next Tuesday, January 7, 2025.

Thank you for reading in 2024!

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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Dear Santa,

The countdown is on. Only a week left until you kiss the wife and board the sleigh. Do you feel harried, like we do?

My guess is no. 

All my teams got the iceberg talk.  We had a paper handout -- clearly before digitization – that we passed out for our players to put in their notebooks on Day One. An enormous floating glacier shelf provided palpable fodder for an important conversation with our team about what the outside world sees and what it doesn’t. The players the media doesn’t feature, the traits that must support the skill sets, the stuff most would call mundane—we had to understand how much it mattered, regardless of the attention it did or did not garner. Though we marvel at the shiny, frozen chunks that proudly poke out above the water, ninety percent of an iceberg’s mass lies below the surface.

“Once-shattered confidence re-breaks easily in familiar places.”  I just entered that in my phone. I said it to a friend this morning while discussing his team’s painful plight in a contest that reflected the worst of them. The sentence, sitting on the shards of a lopsided loss, has a story I can touch. It illuminates and helps us both to find a why-now-how that grounds us. Roots stretch out in all directions around the words. Maybe they still will in a month. Maybe they still will in a year. But then again, maybe they won’t. Most likely when I return to find this sentence under a random “Thoughts” heading on my iPhone, I won’t see the thinking that came before and after. The sentence will float as an alien object disconnected from the shaky ground that bore it. The tenderness will be gone.

A friend of mine once drove from Los Angeles to Yonkers in a flight of panic. Straight through. No pause to see a landmark. No stop to collect two hundred dollars.  No foray to a diner he’d heard about in the news. He just jumped in his car and drove.

We had a robust Japanese Maple just out and to the left of our back door. The breathtaking cultivar started out small but grew crazy over the years, eventually peeking above the roofline and reaching all the way across the flagstone sidewalk it lived beside. I could never bring myself to cut it back. Its branches stretched up and out in haphazard fashion but its foliage, even on the low branches that hovered inches above the ground, turned so brilliant in autumn my heart wouldn’t let me give it a trim. Its leaves would morph from their everyday green (a color you can grow numb to if not careful) to arresting glow-in-the-dark orange when the temperatures started to drop. In the days when dark begins to descend early, the specimen stood like a lantern marking the spot where the pathway turned.

Reposting a thought line that seems fitting for such a time as this . . .

My dad once ran for school board in the small rural town where I grew up. There was some fuss about our superintendent-- best I remember-- though specific fuss about what I’m no longer sure. (If indeed I ever was.) I just remember people being wound up. Almost everyone in the 14 square miles of our oil-field community had pledged allegiance to an opinion and thus had chosen a side. Our tiny town was as fractured as an oil-and-gas pay zone after the drilling is done.

And my dad--of all people--was vying for a chance to enter the fray.

I’m a trier. If you peeled away the flesh and dug inside my bones, you’d find a never-resting, fluttering chaotic mess of WANT-TOs, HAVE-TOs, and NEED-TOs balled up around themselves. For all the things I’m not (and there are many), and all the things I am (though there are several that I wish I weren’t), this one thing they could carve upon my tombstone: “A striver is resting here.” It would be, at once, both gloriously and painfully true.

“Get off the stage, Cash, get off the stage,” Johnny used to say. The country-music legend, known for his growly delivery of born-from-real-life lyrics, found the line between “fairly average” and “truly one-of-a-kind” a razor thin tripwire. In the early 1990s, music producer Rick Rubin began recording Cash singing and strumming in Rubin’s living room. As he asked the musical storyteller to play the songs of his life, Rubin found himself mesmerized by the intimate connectivity of the lyrics pulsing through the man. After a while, the two decided that the informal sessions of self-expression would make an enduring album, so they set up to record. As soon as the light turned red, however, Rubin noticed a change in Cash. The iconic balladeer began performing instead of musically telling his truth.

Part of his heart was missing. 

Aspen trees bow at the base. Almost every single trunk, whether small enough to make a fist around or way too big to encircle even with two fully outstretched hands, has a curve in its trunk that reveals its try. It’s hard to find one of these iconic white main stems that is chopstick straight from the ground to the clouds. And yet, when looked at from a distance, Aspens appear as if a plumb line has been used to plot their path.

Most of us leave an ant trail. We take the same route to work and then back home again...  day after day after day. We have a spot where we grab a coffee, a market where we shop for food, a pew we sit on at church. We have a handful of restaurants where we like to eat, a place where we prefer to get gas, a corner where we buy ice cream. You could jab the spike of a compass at our home address and stretch the pencil arm to trace an arc that delineates the territory where we roam. Occasionally we venture out, but mostly this is where we “live.”  In cities of 100,000... 500,000... 2.5 million, we hang out in our own zones. Most of the houses we pass by look a lot like ours. Most of the cars in the drive-thru where we order our burgers and fries look a lot like ours. It’s like the weather in San Diego: every season is the same.

Sometimes things have to get worse before they can have a chance to get better. Ask anyone going through a home remodel, or chemotherapy, or the reinvention of a golf swing. What’s not great goes to awful enroute to pretty good. And mostly, we accept the detour the same way we accept flying from Oklahoma City to Dallas to get to Minnesota. We do what we need to do to get to where we want to be. Even though it usually takes much longer than we think it should.

We had a reverse sleepover last week, my granddaughter and me. Reverse as in, I pack my toothbrush and go to her turf. We play on her swing, with her toys, in her room with the purple wall (“GG, I love purple, do you love purple?”) and the trundle bed with dinosaur sheets that slides out for sleeping two. 

Despite all that’s crooked and upside-down across the landscape of collegiate sports, Saturdays in the fall are still for football. I love the precision and near perfection of  teams that line up on Sunday, but there’s something about the next-in-lines who take the field the day before that I’m drawn to even more.

Every woman wants to know. Many men, maybe, too. But we don’t hear them asking nearly as much. Not all urgent, anyway, like we do. We pose the question to one another, to the “gurus,” to the Universe at large, our honest yearning squirting out unselfconsciously because we need to know:  How do you balance it all? 

My granddaughter tells me hot and cold are opposites. “Large and small are opposites,” she says, popping the Ps so that each of the three syllables of the word pack an equal punch. “Light and dark are opposites. Fast and slow are opposites. . . .” She can go for days. Her three-year-old brain is creating buckets for where to put things, most of which are cut and dried.