Last week, the Savannah Bananas came to town.  In case you’re not familiar, they’re the traveling baseball circus that has since 2016 turned America’s favorite pastime upside down. For $25, patrons attending Banana games receive a ticket for two hours of dancing, singing, acrobatics-- and baseball—plus all the food and drink they care to consume. The Bananas’ organization has one goal: make baseball fun. Their home games have a waitlist 60,000 people long.

When I was in the dog days of building the women’s basketball program at the University of Oklahoma, I called my good friend Geno Auriemma one evening to solicit some advice. When he answered, I laid out the laundry list of things that had recently gone awry. Those players I had were impossible!  I had to do everything! They were so needy! I raced on without a breath. 

For most of my life, my heart has skipped a beat in May. I could feel it coming. The sad-happy cliffhanger that marks the close of the school year would roar in like a thunderstorm that had been predicted and prepared for but surprised us just the same. May felt magnificent.  Bottomless. Slippery. Simultaneously like a thing we’d like to hang on to forever and yet couldn’t wait to give away. May was the month that wrapped us up and spit us out into the world. 

I don’t do instructions. They give me the heebie-jeebies. The dissecting and the symbols and the do-not-skip-this steps can make anything feel like quantum physics. I’d rather just mess up a bunch and find my own way through. But last Saturday, I waded through a do-it-yourself black- and-white booklet that came stuffed inside the first of two giant boxes full of varying sizes of wood along with bags and bags of bolts and screws. In most matters of construction, I go for a run—as far away from the instruction book as humanly possible-- and let my husband do the dirty work. Not Saturday, though. Saturday, I was all 69 pages in because we had a swing set to build.

As a college basketball coach, I was often asked, “When searching for players to recruit, do you look for skill or athleticism?”

“Ummm, both please.”

“Both” was the truest answer, but that’s not what people wanted to hear. What they wanted to know was, if forced to pick, which would I prefer. There’s just something about a rabbit hole that most of us can’t resist. And the world can’t get enough of either/or.

Practice makes perfect. At least that’s what my fifth-grade basketball coach used to say. 

When you repeat a process, you get better at it. The reps help you figure out what works and what doesn’t, what’s helpful and what’s not. And you get smoother, faster-- more efficient and more skilled-- at whatever it is you are practicing. From dribbling a basketball to changing a tire to speaking in front of people, the more you do it, the better you get. 

The best basketball teams almost always are so because they have at least one guy with eyes in the back of his head.  One guy who sees not just what is happening but any number of things that could be happening next.  One guy who makes everybody else look like a million dollars because of where he puts the ball. 

In 1995, a trailer pulled into Yellowstone National Park and dumped out eight grey wolves. The wolves’ job was to recalibrate the ecosystem of one of our country’s most prized parcels of real estate that had been severely damaged 70 years earlier by the eradication of this natural predator. In the decade between 1914 and 1925, over 130 wolves were purposely killed in the park. What happened next was a bunch of very bad things. With the wolves gone, the elk and coyote assumed the role of alphas. They overpopulated and then overgrazed the willow and aspen trees. So the songbirds left. And the eagles left. Without the trees, the beavers couldn’t build dams. So the beavers left. And the foxes followed them. Without the dams, the streams began to erode. So the fish died. And the grasses disappeared. In a fairly short amount of time, Yellowstone went from an interconnected, thriving mecca to a rapidly declining, largely dysfunctional landscape whose insides seemed to be at war with one another. Instead of saving the park, wildlife experts almost ruined it.

I bet a lot of Middle C gets played in Heaven. The frequency it floats on is wrapped in Jesus juice. When I hear it, I hear “ahhhhh.” Something about the note is just calming—maybe even soothing—in a you-don’t-even-realize-it’s-happening kind of way.  From out of nowhere, without fanfare, it can make us feel like we are home.

When my two-year old granddaughter falls or bumps into something or drops a book about Peter Rabbit on her foot, her inclination is to cry.  Usually, there is a tiny pause—like a half of a second-- between the time the encounter happens and the arrival of the realization that it didn’t feel good to her brain. In that blink-and-you-miss-it gap, she’s learned to make a decision about how she will respond. 

What she does is “shake it off.” 

Literally.  

The once familiar road has debris stacked 10 feet tall on either side now, intermittently, for more than half a mile. But oddly enough, that’s not what makes it look like somewhere I’ve never been. It’s the space behind the piles of twisted metal and uprooted trees that looks so foreign. I never knew how the land laid underneath the structures and the growth. This stretch of 60th street in east Norman was composite in my mind.

What’s a paladin?  If you watched Furman upset Virginia in the first round of the men’s NCAA tournament, you already know what a paladin is.  It had been 43 years since the liberal arts school in Greenville, South Carolina had been invited to the dance, and head coach, Bob Richey’s cast of characters were not about to let the opportunity go to waste. By the way, in case you missed it, a paladin is a knight.

“Woman finds herself,” the headline read. And she did.  Literally.  Not in the metaphysical kind of way where after weeks and months of meditation and soul-searching she discovered who she really was, but in the physical kind of way where she went looking for a missing person and discovered she was her.  It happened in 2012 in Iceland as a group toured the volcanic region near the Eldgja canyon.

I’ve never been big on clubs. The picking and the parceling. The initiations and the rules. And yet, I’ve always been somewhat in awe of the way the walls come down when a kappa meets a kappa in an airport Starbucks line. Organizations of inclusion—and exclusion per definition—crisscross the striations of our society.  Some have formal boxes to be checked, complete with dues and requirements and the sharing of secret handshakes, pins, and codes. But just as many co-exist organically, without any expectation of bending to become. They form from shared experience— the roads we walk together even though we’re far apart.

I love the “Gilmore Girls.” I loved it when it was happening and after it happened and through the bonus “A Year in the Life” encore season created by Netflix. I love the dialogue on speed, the kind you have to listen to closely because if you don’t it doesn’t even sound like words. I love the characters and the family dynamics that were constantly being waded through-- so much so that I didn’t even mind that the entire seven season show seemed to be filmed in a circular town with a gazebo in the middle. Lorelai and Rory, the ever-evolving mother-daughter duo from the hit, have been in the background for lots of the days of our family’s lives.

The sign on the side of the highway said, “HITCHHIKERS MAY BE ESCAPING INMATES.” It’s a serious sign-- not the kind made of cardboard and magic marker constructed on a whim in somebody’s backyard. It’s metal, painted bright yellow with professional black lettering, and it is welded to steel pipes permanently secured in the dirt.

Some thought has gone into this. 

In the check-out line at Target, I found myself mindlessly singing under my breath, “Baby shark doo doo da-do-da-do, baby shark doo doo da-do-da-do.” I don’t even think I would have realized what I was doing had I not noticed the young woman in line in front of me bobbing her head along with the beat. What is it about children’s songs that makes them play inside your head like a needle stuck on vinyl? It’s as if their melodies are coated in Pinetar. You can’t shake them if you try.

“Life is not about waiting for the storms to pass but learning to dance in the rain.” That’s the inscription that accompanied Britney Brown’s senior picture in our University of Oklahoma basketball team room. As was our tradition, when each player graduated, she selected her favorite quote to accompany a photo of her in action while wearing crimson and cream. Those inspirational posters lined the walls of our team film room where they breathed life into each season with an intimate and yet taunting call. The film room resonated with the spirit of former Sooners, their selected quotes framing their careers and, in many instances, the very way in which they saw the world. For me, they served as little green street signs that popped up when I least expected them but sorely needed them most.

Tom Landry coached in a fedora.  So did Bear Bryant. And they both looked just as formal below their chins as they did from their eyebrows up. Sport coats, ties, and shiny wing-tipped shoes were the “leader uniform” in their era. Today we can’t imagine Andy Reid on the sideline in pinstripes with a pocket square or Kyle Shanahan holding his laminated play sheets without a flat bill on. Things change. Sports-- and the society they help form the fabric of-- evolve. Traditions live until they need to die, and then new ways of doing things take hold. What we wear to work is no exception to the ever-spinning wheel. And while I’m not sure the head coach’s attire matters much to the guys wearing helmets on the field, I have to wonder if it plays a role in how he does his job. In the trade-off of the necktie for the hoody, what might the head coach gain and what might he stand to lose?

In that space right before you do a thing that you’ve never done but know you can, lives bravado the size of a buffalo. “What ifs” don’t distract you because you don’t even know they are there. The slate is too clean to be littered with all that could and might go wrong.  All you see is what you want to happen because you are writing the script and you’ve played the dream a million times already in your head (the place where everything works until you have evidence that it doesn’t…. when you are young and hungry and can’t wait to shock the world.) Decisions are quick and sure. You don’t hem. You don’t haw. You just go for it. At the beginning, you’ll try almost anything.