The Right Time

We’re on the bumpy asphalt behind the school building and I am in third grade. Some kids are swinging, some are climbing on the monkey bars, the broody ones are sitting next to the red brick building scowling because they have to be outside in the heat. My friends and I are jumping rope.

I looooooove school. Especially when I get to flop around in the marrow of my happy place – at recess with a jump rope and the sky the only limit of what I might be able to do.

We jump a single rope first, my friends and I, each end twirled by a teacher. Entering one at a time, we alternately burst in for a certain number of jumps then out the other side and back to the end of the line. Hopping, chanting and counting, we glide in and out of the loop without the rope ever so much as grazing our backs. It rotates. Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack. Its rhythm is our instruction book. I am a master jumper, a setter of the pace.

Single jumping, though, is simply where we start. Single rope jumping is like two-line lay-ups before a basketball game. What we really live to do is Double Dutch. 

In Double Dutch jumping, two ropes are turned simultaneously in opposite directions as the two twirler’s hands (in our case, the two coolest teachers ever) move in converse circles. Each rope alternately smacks the ground at the same place so that once we get in, it’s business as usual. We jump on one foot, then on two… we turn and twist and high step to show off.  Inside the middle it feels easy. It’s predictable and fun in there. 

The going in and coming out is where it gets tricky. Some of my friends measure with their hands, mimicking the arc of the rope. But the longer they wait, the skinnier the openings get. After a bit it feels as if there is never really a right time to go.

* * * * * * * *

Doors open, rarely in succession like dominoes, where you can see the one you’re supposed to walk through next.  Mostly, opportunities present themselves haphazardly, as if a swirling wind is making laps around our lives. We’re only given a brief second to decide whether to enter the passageway. Too much consideration can be costly. Doors that open also close.

Is there ever such a thing as the perfect time?

I was 32 weeks pregnant and in love with my life, when a cadre of businessmen from the community of Norman where I taught and coached at the high school politely knocked on the metal louvered doors of my basketball office. We were just a couple of weeks removed from our second girls’ basketball State Championship and I was nesting in every space that was mine - including the un-airconditioned lair my players and I shared under the armpit of the north bleachers of the gym. 

When my visitors knocked, I was perplexed. One of the two doors was always open and most people – even if both doors were closed – hardly ever bothered to knock. I craned my neck to see who might be there and shouted, “Come in?!!?”

I don’t recall how many men strolled in but definitely more than two were wearing freshly pressed khakis lightly landing on the tongue of polished loafers, and at least one of the group was suited and tied. They looked like Martians standing in our slightly stinky, unkempt space. I couldn’t imagine what they might want or need. 

After a quick and somewhat awkward congratulations on the championship we’d just won, one of the men got straight to the point.

“We think you need to be the next coach at the University.”

“Excuse me?” I asked, thinking I’d been pranked.

“The OU job is open and we believe you’re what the program needs.”

I laughed, but my visitors didn’t. They were serious. They each had talking points. They spoke as if closing a deal.

I thought certainly they’d been day drinking, unsure of why they cared. All that I could think about was how perfect my life felt before they had walked in.

On the giant whiteboard screwed to the cinder-block wall was “Chandler” scrawled in red and circled. ”Chandler” was both a town off the turnpike from Oklahoma City to Tulsa and also the name we’d chosen for the baby in my belly who was getting ready to rock our worlds. My team had scrawled a dozen Oklahoma towns on the board drawing a single line through all the others…Prague, Stroud, Kellyville… as if they too were in consideration in the name-the-baby game. The office reeked of high school girls. The gold ball they had given us for winning our last game was on a file cabinet next to my desk. Bags, balls, mail and scorebooks littered the raggedy couch where the players lounged as well as the stained indoor-outdoor carpet the couch sat upon. This place where dreams were hatched and the plans outlined to make them come true were drawn was my second home.

I had a husband and a four-year-old son at home, a ready-to-burst-out baby girl in my tummy, a job I  loved and squad (a SQUAD!!) returning. But the room now had a door ajar. While it wasn’t perfect timing, I had to at least consider walking through.

Giving birth two weeks after being introduced at the press conference as the next women’s basketball coach at the University of Oklahoma, complicated things a bit. (The least of which was what to wear behind the dais that day!) That summer of recruiting with a full family in tow was an adventure. The first two years of Chandler’s life are a blur. Undoubtedly, another time would have been more convenient.

But doors appear when they do.

The right time is hardly ever perfect, no matter how much we try to plan and predetermine. Opportunities pop up when the house has just been completed, or the kids have just started high school, or the parents have just begun to decline. Life gives us all sorts of markers that can help determine what we should do, but rarely, if ever, do the aspects surrounding any moment fold into order like birds migrating in a “V.” Sacrifices almost always ride shotgun with a jump.

The only way you get anywhere is to weigh both sides. Compelling reasons typically line up in support of each, but at some point you simply have to choose whether or not to take the door. It’s that easy and that hard all at once. There’s no such thing as the right time to go.


P.S. Time Flies by in the Yellow and Green

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