For the third time in a year, I was able to attend a pro basketball game Saturday night and sit in seats at courtside. From this vantage point, the blinding speed, the deft agility, and the pure athleticism of elite performers was on display to the point of over-stimulation.
The lights and the noise are intense. The master choreographer seems to believe that even one moment of relative silence is not to be tolerated. The spectacle overwhelms the actual game, unless you are a few feet away from the floor, which is where my companion and I sat.
Here, you get familiar with each player's expressions, his voice, and the way he motions his teammates as sophisticated plays unfold. The action is so swift that my camera could never even begin to capture the actual scene. Instead, I inadvertently documented a sort of abstract expressionist interpretation of NBA basketball.
Only during timeouts, when the lights came up, and the cheerleaders came out, did the scene come back into momentary focus. The cheerleaders' diversity was inspiring -- blond girls, Asian girls, Latinas, black girls, tall and short, skinny and curvy. They all love to dance.
They were constantly in motion, and their smiles aren't painted on. Dancing around like this in sexy clothes is great fun. Regardless of whether they know (or care) very much about the actual game of basketball.
These girls and the fans were not to be disappointed tonight. The Warriors won, in a blowout, 131-105.The Warriors are coached by a legend, Don Nelson, nicknamed Nellie. He is a big man, with a shock of white hair, and he knows the game of basketball from a strategic perspective as few others do. He seems to be building a team that can be a winner -- a rarity in Oakland the past 14 years or so. His teams play an aggressive run and gun type of offense; his ideal player steals the ball from opponents and initiates an exciting race to the other end of the court, where a lay-up, dunk, or violent collision with a defender (yielding foul shots) is in order.
The crowd gets worked up by these incidents, and in this game, the Warriors scored 29 points off of turnovers, a nice total.
***
After midnight, my phone started ringing. It was my twelve-year-old, at his sleepover, 20 miles from my house. He sounded sleepy and sad. Everyone else was asleep, he said. I suggested he get some milk or something to eat, and then call me back.
He did, a few minutes later. Then again, and then again. He said he was also trying to reach his mom. But he couldn't, so it made him feel good that he could talk to me.
By the 5th or 6th call, I could tell he was getting very tired. He knew it too, and said he thought he might try to sleep now. I said that I would stay awake for a long time just in case. At 11 minutes to 1 am, according to cellphone, we rang off.
Thus enlivened, rather than drifting off happily to sleep, with a soft rain falling outside my bedroom window, I got up and had a large plate of shrimp cocktail. This was good, and it almost unleashed an additional hunger that luckily did not come to pass. Because I am well stocked with all sorts of things one shouldn't be eating past midnight.
Somewhere later on, in the darkness and the silence, I remembered being my son's age, alone at night, in my case usually with a slightly older teenager in the next room as our babysitter. But the noises outside and inside the house seemed amplified. It was windy in those parts, and the wind chilled my thoughts and fantasies of awful dangers beyond the sheetrock and the yellow bricks and the double pane windows.
On the positive side of family intimacy is the element of feeling safe.
Yet there are forces always at work, some external, some internal, that easily undermine any person's sense of safety. It's a world of dangers, certain in every case to end badly, unless you consider departure a relief from these demons, which for many it ultimately is.
So much anxiety and so much angst. So much loneliness and so much fear. Only connect. Find (or rediscover) that special person who you know you can always count on long past midnight, when the ghosts come out to play.
It's a nice time to have a friend, and not only at age 12.
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