Church, Ninjas, and my Basketball Dreams

I was a shy kid growing up. And I guess, to some degree, I still am. But when I was younger I was all shy and coming out of my shell had no register in my little but smart brain. I internalized everything. And after I internalized once, I would again send that tape of information through the channels of my consciousness to get reprocessed and reanalyzed whereby there would be no product of output but a hell of a lot of input stored away in the recesses of a boy hidden away somewhere just shy of the Texas Panhandle.

On Sundays two decades past, my grandparents would take me to church. My grandmother wasn’t the kindest woman, but yet she knew me and she granted me a bit of benevolence in ways I can only now interpret. I hated groups of other kids. Like I mentioned earlier, I was shy, and shyness, at least at that age, doesn’t translate as just antisocial and reserved, but translates as a genuine fear, make it distrust, of my peers. If you were to compound my peers into a humongous group called Sunday School, where boys would be pickin’ on boys they hate and where boys would be pickin’ on girls they like, and girls would wear their Sunday best only quarterly-conscious that they were even at the age of seven trying to lure in a possible best mate, that in-and-of-itself would easily be terrifying to such a shy boy. Those social gymnastics in a group of mostly white middle-class middle-American boys and girls scared the shyness back into me. With that said, my grandmother knew this, and though she was a tough woman, especially tough on me, her maternal instincts knew it’d be best to let me sit with her and my grandfather at adult, grown-up, boring church.

Now, the reason it was benevolence, or at best a compromise on her part, is no matter how shy of a boy I was, I was still a prepubescent boy with the attention span of a pre-pubescent boy. And with that said, sitting in on what a “good day” would only consist of an hour-and-a-half long church service, was still an experience with that of a drooling sleeping fidgeting whining obnoxious imaginative boy. And I’d be there, just another American (brown) boy in a red pew, already learned of this mid-American mega-church’s liturgy, knowing when to sit when I was supposed to stand, and when to stand when I was supposed to sit, really just employing to the fullest of what it meant, and what it still means to be an obnoxious but normal boy.

As we three sat there, I smartly reasoned to kill that thirty to forty-minute window of boringness when the preacher would talk about stuff completely unrelated to the mind and attentions of a six-year old boy while all the while fulfilling the dreams of my grandmother of being a quiet, attentive, and respectful young man, by employing my aforementioned imagination. I’m sure I got lost many a times in many different theatres of the mind, but the one that I remember the most is that as we sat on the top floor of a two-floor sanctuary, and as we sat in the farthest pew nailed to the farthest back wall isolated from the rest of the brotherhood of the church, I, and specifically my mind’s eye, got the best bird’s eye view of the whole sanctuary. And as I would sit there, mind you only a child, yet a mischievous but shy one, I’d take stock of the schematics of the sanctuary’s construction. I’d see cross-beams as well as the speakers from the ceiling. I’d take inventory of supports and possible entrance and exit points. Could I swing from that rafter with a rope off that chain that holds a two-hundred pound gynormous speaker, and after takin’ all the church’s bank, swing through the stained glass window that served as the sanctuary’s penitent of Godly worship as my finale and exit where my chariot, with or without sexy sidekick, awaited me in the back parking lot? You bet I could. Whether my grandparents knew it or not, even though they limited my TV watching, especially X-Men and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, whatever I had seen had inspired me to believe that to some degree I was a vandal or a mutant or a hero posing as a boy who was soon to unleash on this church my wrath against boredom, and well, annoying Sunday’s best apparel.

Even though there was no loot in the church, and really the only bank that was worth stealing was in the mansions of the pastors and the homes of the conservative patrons, my imagination was vested through that thirty-minute span as being the superhero. I had such a strong imagination. I could be sitting in class, sitting on the toilet, sitting in a red church pew wearing a grey blazer with a blue micky-mouse embroidered tie, or I could be sitting on the concrete as my older cousins would play another physical game of pick-up basketball and my imagination would just go.

Soon after, my mom and I moved north a couple of hours and even though the scenery had changed, or maybe just shifted, my imagination stayed the same. Actually, since my sphere of outside influence changed, meaning there was less family for me to be forced to be around, my imagination grew exponentially. No longer was there communication from close but outside sources to stir me. It was just me and my mother who was working way too hard to have the time to ground me in any normal non-isolated framework, therefore my imagination continued to grow. As it grew, my imagination changed from ninjas and turtles, and got funneled into sports. I was still very shy, and even more so, I was terrified of others (my shell had gotten thicker), so every opportunity there was to play sports by myself, my imagination took over and projected the rest. When I look back now upon the specter that was that time in my life, I can’t imagine being a neighbor or any spectator looking on an open field or an apartment complex’s tennis court that held one meager basketball hoop, and see this chubby brown boy running and juking and shooting and not just once but continually as long as the day ran. And that’s what I would do. Whether it was the shitty plastic football I had, or the almost decent Wilson street court basketball I loved, I would always just play.

All kids who were and are into sports do it. They use their imagination to fill in the blanks. The narrative that is like all narratives filled with villains and audiences and components such as conflict and climax are transported into the villa of sport where the sole auteur is the child’s lone imagination. I like to think my imagination was Caravaggio and where the Calling of Saint Matthew interprets as the Divine’s churrascaria'd light upon the chosen Remoy Philip whose calling it was to hit the game winning free-throw line fall-away jumper just over the out-stretched reaches of Michael “Air” Jordan and win the game for the what? The New York Knicks? (I know this presents a conflict for Spike (Mars-Blackmon) Lee and every born and bred Texan. But it’s the best type of conflict.)

I’m a lot older now, and with that I don’t have the time or effort for imaginative gymnastics. Well at least not on the court. However, it’s still there when it comes to sports. You see, it’s been transmuted into the sports spectator modal rather than the athlete modal. When once I was a child and I’d imagine I was a hero, I now watch the men who play the game and create in them, at least in my mind, and to some degree my platforming words, the Hero.

We did this as kids. For me it was Starks and (Allen) Houston and of course, Jordan. But as the Knicks continued to fail me, and then the hellacious Isaiah Thomas debacle of management, and after Jordan retired, my priorities shifted to girls, “cool,” and finding a way out of my shell. And as those priorities became the new and only priorities of my life, my imagination, especially when it came to sports, quietly went dormant. And for years, I stopped caring, and I lost interest in the Hero.

But it’s back now. Especially this year, after the team I picked six years ago got over this past summer the winning lottery ticket of “I’m takin’ my talents to South Beach,” my spectator imagination is renewed and in full force. As I sit in sports bars, I see gods and angels on the courts doing things I wish I could do. Yet through the filter of my humble rationale, I know no matter how much I dream I couldn’t and can’t do it the same. I love the metaphor David Foster Wallace uses when describing Hero athletes: “Great athletes are profundity in motion. They enable abstractions like power and grace and control to become not only incarnate but televisable. To be a top athlete, performing, is to be that exquisite hybrid of animal and angel that we average unbeautiful watchers have such a hard time seeing in ourselves.” It’s not that I have a hard time seeing it in myself, but to jump like Dwyane Wade jumps or to dunk like Lebron dunks, I just can’t do. So for them, I imagine them the Hero, and as the story progresses I just pray they won’t let me down.

Don’t get me wrong though, the feeling of holding a basketball and trying to palm it doesn’t go without the now natural inclination to want to be that athletic Adonis. I spent the last few months, after a two-year hiatus, working in the classroom with kids. And almost every Saturday morning that I was there, I was keen on the fact that there was basketball in the room. It’s as if I couldn’t contain myself, because at the end of each class when the girls would be cleaning up and all the other teachers in the room were celebrating each kid’s unique talents, I would find my way to that basketball. Now so what if the rules in the classroom were no ball-playing, and God forbid, no bouncing, dribbling, or any ball-moving gymnastics were to be allowed. I was, at least for a second the god, the hero, the anti-hero, and that basketball was there for my sport. So I’d grab the ball and start playing with it, exercising it in some degree or fashion, and almost instantaneously any and all of the boys there gravitated towards me, or at least towards the ball. And for the few moments we could get away with it, there we’d be, all us boys (one old, the rest young) playing make-shift “you can’t steal it from me,” or “check this out” or “Mr. Remoy, over here, over here.” It never lasted for more than a few minutes because soon to follow I’d have to grab the attention of my age because like clockwork there’d be a glare or two from the other volunteers and teachers bringing me back to the rules and the reality that I’m not really that type of hero and these boys were students ready to write.

One thing I’ve come to learn from those last few months with those kids was that I couldn’t teach them to write. I know we were the teachers and volunteers and we were there to create an hour-and-a-half long biosphere of authentic authorship. We were there to answer questions and refine each child’s mechanics. I was there to help mold them. But what I’ve come to see is that the molding process, when it comes to children, it isn’t a pressing process but rather a process of opening. Those kids could already write, I just had to foster the one thing I now hope they will never lose.

I remember my mother and my grandmother’s will upon myself was to some degree codify me and my internalizations. Their domestic jobs were there to really build parameters and walls in my psyche that would facilitate an orderly matured life. That was their job and that was their role. However, there has to be an outside source, whether it be a teacher or another influence, that in the same way those walls of order were built, challenges the same walls by trying to expose them to that child’s imagination. Their job is to foster that child’s imagination. I’ve come to realize that was my job with those few students over the last couple of months and that’s the most necessary faculty for a writer. And children, at their prime have the healthiest of imaginations, and now as an almost adult, I can’t help but want to more than ever, dote on imagination.

I like to think, not too much has really changed. I’d be lying if I said, it isn’t one of the first things I look for or think about when I walk into any church. The playful thoughts abound, and maybe or maybe not nostalgically, as I look to the rafters and see all the ways and possibilities I could make out ninja-style with the non-existent loot. And I don’t think a day will go by when I see or hold a basketball and dream that I’m that participant on the hardwood court jumping and flying, angelically, in an imaginative play of sport and dreams not only being the winner but the hero that the world has yet to dream of. But at least now the number on my jersey will read “3” and above it will read the name “Wade.”