A soft landing

Lingering in the hazy, liminal space between the last of summer and fall, and this NBA offseason into the next one.

We were looking for the moon. The sun had turned the backyard of Margarita’s sister’s place in Mimico from a mosaic of greens, the leaves of well-tended plants grown huge all shot through with light, to a hazy goldenrod, to a dusky powder blue, and finally a plunging full-dark as it sank for good, replaced by popping orange embers from the fire pit sparking into the air and streaking their sudden light over our faces.

Margarita had been back since the beginning of August, visiting from Amsterdam. I was trying to think of the last time I’d seen her, maybe years ago, when she was living in New York. The first thing she said to me when I walked up the steps to her sister’s open door and into her arms was, You look the same. Now, in the yard after a perfect summer dinner — lamb ragù empanadas, hunks of wood fired chicken, baked farro with feta, green salad and for dessert, a thin layered hazelnut flour cake that tasted like one my oma used to make and a big communal bowl of cold watermelon — I was pulling faces at her six-month-old daughter, bouncing in my lap. Once in a while the dog would go tearing toward the back fence, intent on the nocturnal animals stirring awake. For a few minutes we talked about taking a walk down to the lake, just blocks away, to see if we could find the moon over the water and watch coyotes move like quicksilver across sand gone the same pale lambent hue as their fur.

We’d met, as we reminisced in the kitchen hours earlier, in a town two hours west of Toronto. A town where you could make your own reputation, I explained to Margarita’s partner. There were some laughs like, maybe we should change the subject, but I hadn’t meant it like that. Only that the town felt so small compared to what we were used to that we went around with all the arrogance of teenagers plus feeling like we knew better, and in that combination came a proud, if a bit raw, autonomy — something wild, bound to its own rules. The world as a place we could slip in and out of.

Margarita studied linguistics, and at 17 and fresh out of high school, I had just moved as something to do. Now, she works in the arts and I work in basketball (after a brief stint in the arts, among others), and while we both knew and understood each other’s zig-zagging routes to the present well enough, we could still laugh at the trajectory. From jumping the cliffs at Elora Gorge into the tourmaline bright water of the quarry in summer, or driving through farm fields covered with snow glowing blue under the moon in winter, huffing into our hands for her first car’s sporadic heat and fogging the windows, to this, to here, the vigorous, warm weight of the baby shifting in my lap like an extension of her and how I know her best — laughing.

Our eyes traced the sparks of the fire up but still, we couldn’t find the moon. At some point, realizing the time, Dylan and I lamentably admitted we had to go home. It felt like coming out of a good dream, getting up slow and bringing plates quiet to the kitchen and slipping our shoes on and giving hugs all around. The sense of one reality being swapped for the next, a transition we make hundreds of times in a day but are rarely as aware of as when tearing from the soft visions and warm comfort in sleep.

We hadn’t been driving long when a pale shape materialized at the side of the road and went drifting across, then held to the middle line on the empty road in front of us. A coyote, big and healthy, absolutely present, trotting so lightly it seems to float. It slipped across the last two lanes, hopped the curb, and disappeared in a last tawny flash between trees. Seconds later I’ll see the moon for the first time, gold and rising to the west where the coyote disappeared. I text Margarita. It’s like we willed them, she writes back.

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Are you enjoying the offseason? I was asked the other day. A common question in the ecosystem of the NBA, but one I’ve never had an answer to, at least in its intentioned sense of a holiday pleasantry.

Since I started covering basketball I’ve always been freelance and freelance for more than one place, I haven’t had summers off. Prior to 2020 I also had full-time jobs outside of basketball to balance. Even now, the myriad of other writing work I do to make full-time freelance sustainable (copywriting, research, consulting, book writing) doesn’t take summers off (nor, of course, does the WNBA), but I still appreciate the question.

I appreciate it too for its timing. That it’s asked almost as a reminder that we’re in an offseason, rather than the reality of there actually being one. I usually start to hear it at Summer League. Funny, considering if being there never quite feels like work, it is (this year I was doing three jobs, a new record for me). I do have friends who technically have summers off from the NBA, full-time staff writers and broadcasters, and even then they are on loose clocks — one eye on their vacations, put off until this brief window of late July through September, the other on their phones, the timelines, in case something comes up. I’m guilty of the same question and feel the most doltish about asking it to people with team jobs. They get a faraway look in their eyes, tell me about the trip they took immediately when their season ended (assuming a non-playoff team, in a brief window sometime between May and the Draft), the contours of it already blurring for them.