LACES
Cover: The University’s lovely bell tower, in colored glass, by Renee Straube, an art teacher at nearby Roosevelt High School. Photo by Adam Guggenheim.
I was in a gymnasium recently with a gaggle of very small boys, watching them shoot around wildly and giggledly before their basketball practice, when I saw a tiny not tiny moment which I find, weeks and weeks later, unforgettable. Why is it that the slightest things are the ones we remember best in the end? Why is that? I mean, sure we remember the fraught light on our wedding days, and where we were standing when evil news arrived, and the surge of fright and delight when we got the job, or the baby was born, or the tumor was benign; but you know what I mean when I say that we remember far better the exact perfect way to make sandwiches for each child, one with hardly any peanut butter and another with butter and peanut butter and the third with only peanut butter, and the way your grandfather whickered like an asthmatic horse when he was amused, and how Saturday morning light arrived at a different angle than weekday light when you were a kid in bed, and how your brothers slowly waking in their beds sounded very much like bears lumbering blearily awake in the remotest snowiest canyons of the West. The coach blew his whistle — another sharp sound loaded with meaning and memory and shrill and sprint and sweat and sore — and the boys shambled to center court for what promised to be an inspirational speech from the coach, who looked pregnant with wisdom. But then I saw the tiny not tiny moment. A dad was kneeling on the sideline re-tying his son’s shoelaces. The shoelaces were orange. The sneakers were blue. The father was bent over the laces like he was praying. The son was perhaps six years old. He was perhaps four feet high. He was staring at his teammates. They were not looking at him. His hands were on his father’s shoulders. Perhaps the father was saying something to his son but I couldn’t hear. I was that father. I was that son. All at once I desperately wanted the boy to look down at his father with tenderness and love and reverence. I wanted this with all my heart and soul. Just for an instant I wanted the boy to see his father, to get the dimmest vaguest sense of the mystery kneeling at his feet and making sure the laces were tight and double- or even triple-knotted so there were no loose ends. It turns out you cannot tie up all the loose ends as a dad but you sure can try. The dad finished one sneaker and went to work on the other and then the boy glanced down at his father. I was sitting a ways away so I couldn’t see the boy’s face clearly, and maybe he was impatient or embarrassed or muttering something low in his throat like hurry up dad!, but maybe not, you know? Maybe not. Maybe just for an instant, even though he was only six years old, even though he was in a hurry to get onto the court, even though his dad was taking an agonizingly long time to tie his laces, maybe he looked down at his dad and got a jolt of something that I cannot find the right word for, something that defines and elevates and rivets us, something bigger than us, something the boy, if he was lucky, would someday feel the other way around, too. The dad finished and looked up and seemed about to say something but the boy flew out onto the court, almost hopping over his dad in his hurry, and the dad stood up slowly. Maybe then he sat down in the bleachers to watch, or maybe he slipped out to run errands until practice was over, but I didn’t see, because to my surprise I was so moved that I had to go walk up and down the hallway for a while, looking at photographs of all the boys who had played basketball in this gym over the years, arranged in order all the way back to 1911, which was, as you know, only twenty years after the game was invented, on a winter day, in Massachusetts. Brian Doyle is the editor of this magazine, and the author most recently of The Mighty Currawongs & Other Stories.