a taste of my youth

My friend Betsy and I went to the playground today for a little shoot-around. Basketball isn't really my favourite sport (I just don't have the knack of it), and I can't talk her out to the tennis courts - so we went to where the hoops are.

Last time we went out there, we played a two-on-two with a couple of fellows (we'll call them Jim and Jam). It was a good, intense, and equal match. They were out again today, and we started a game.

And then, five fifteen year old schoolboys of Indo-Pakistani descent asked us in broad Yorkshire accents if we wanted to play full-court with them.

Betsy beckoned to me. "This is getting out of control, Nas."

I agreed. I was really out there for the company and I'm crap at team sports, but by this point the loudest (and least athletic) of the kids was already dividing us into teams. "What the hell Betsy," I said, stretching my thirty-four year old quadriceps, "let's give them a run for their money."

"They probably have more money than we do," Betsy shot back.

Before things got rolling there was the requisite round of trash-talk. The Loudmouth kid was
being, well, loud. I noticed he was wearing jeans and started calling him Levi Strauss (after the denim company, of course - not the famous structuralist anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss - although I don't imaine the kids were confused). Somehow, I also dubbed another of the kids "Tyra" (after the fashion model Tyra Banks...he took it really well, though!)

We split into teams and on our first possession when I brought the ball up into their court and an overly eager defender broke my glasses. Nothing takes the fun out of an early evening game than that. And in that moment, I was reminded of an old truth:

No matter how old you get, if you're standing on tarmac with a slightly bent nose and a broken pair of glasses in your hand while a friend puts a hand on your shoulder, asking "Are you all right?" - you're seven years old. It's an involuntary reaction that feels disturbingly like "My mom is gonna KILL me when I get home."

(But I think I've grown a little since then. I went home and got my 'nerd' frames and played out the rest of the game - which is an improvement over staying home and weeping into a bowl of fruit cocktail while getting yelled at for being careless...)