An exercise in restraint
Bracing for winter with delusion, diversion, but probably not with All-Star.
The air this time of year, with the cold permeating through it, tends to look chalky, but the first thing I see when I step outside is the bright yellow fire hydrant in front of our place and idling beside it, the candy red wall of Ashley’s Jeep.
I heave the passenger door open, laughing, always, at the size of this thing. Ashley is smiling behind the wheel and looking at me over the top of her sunglasses, one hand with an iced coffee and the other sweeping the usual car detritus off the empty seat.
“Here,” she says, “wanna get in and catch up for a minute?”
The minute melts into an hour I won’t clock until I go back inside, straining January sun cast through the wide, salt and road clouded windshield notching up the temperature in the car until we’re baking in our big black winter puffers. Ashley is always disarming, but not having seen her in weeks there’s an added unburdening in the calibre and clip of our conversation.
Two years ago I might not have recognized, or been as comfortable with, this kind of spontaneous shedding of shared accounts. And not the subjects, but the speed. Pacing has gone out the window and no wonder, even when things, here, were open, there was still the overarching structure of knowing you’d be leaving the house just to come back to it in a set amount of time. Spontaneity was necessarily set aside. Add to that Toronto winter, a seasonal constraint we’re more familiar with, and spending time with friends right now feels like what it is to come in from the cold. You peel each layer off, flushed and sweating a little, relief going through you like warmth back in your extremities, and expose yourself, your life in that glimpse, instantly and as best you can. You don’t know when you’ll get such a spontaneous stretch like this again.
The closest I’d got to escaping myself in the wider world with the same regularity had been in going back to games. The pre, during and post routine of an arena on game day like a small country when it comes to customs, structure, mobilization and rules, spoken and not. Slipping into that always gives me a small rush, learning and navigating that wholly insular, self possessed, self important, outsized and furiously bright little world well enough that for four to five hours I could be fluent, feel like I’d picked up a new passport. I’ve always liked that feeling — a mix of anonymity, keen understanding and the lightness that comes with challenging yourself, the rush of riding nerves — but I had a new sense of appreciation for it and for being back in the land where I can find it again and again after having that region abruptly revoked. An otherwise drab and purely purpose-built arena that comes to life when filled with the right mix of sound, people, light, promise — the chemistry of entertainment, ethics of diversion.
Winter is an exercise in restraint. My body, limited to what it can do and how, my brain, muted against its will, less expansive, as I take down tiny, pre-measured drops from a bottle of liquid vitamin D daily as a flimsy shield. I restrain my plans, my productive hours, into the clipped daylight. If I were a more robust person, less inclined to curl into myself with the cold, then I guess I’d be out there making the most of a fleeting season, but I’m not, and nothing about winter feels brief to me.
I’ve found small ways to press against it, even if only by projecting. Picturing my body in water, a middling psychic transference. Wading through lazy waves in Huatulco, wary of where the sand bars drop away underfoot. The bright, cold saline of the Atlantic slapping my body in a secret crescent beach where a salt marsh ran back out into the ocean at the bottom of Nova Scotia, seals bobbing like big, sunburned tourists out past the breakers. Flipping onto my back at the end of outdoor lane swim to float under the diving board and hear my pulse thud hard in my ears underwater, sun beating into my red face. Water’s a conductor and for me it transfers mood, time, memory. This winter I had planned to picture it less, feel it more, had been swimming into a rhythm that would buoy me through even the bleakest days but the pools have been closed since the week of Christmas and I’m catching myself running the fabric of my swimsuits against my fingers, a Speedo as prayer beads, when I reach into the drawer to pull out my tights.
All-Star was another way to circumnavigate the winter. All-Star as a buzzy divider of February, the weekend itself and the prep and flurry leading up to it. Even All-Star in Chicago, just as cold or even colder than here, was a break. A wind-burnt, sleepless, constantly overwhelming break, but a respite just the same. This is the first year — because last year’s in Atlanta was wrong despite every league-justified reason — that I’m talking myself out of it.
Saying it feels too soon makes sense to me until I take the last three months and put them in context. Too soon is relative, depending on where you live and what the world around you is doing, but also too soon compared to when? When we stabilize from this variant, either by widespread enough transmission or blunted by enough boosters, into the next stretch of normalcy that feels bucolic enough to nudge ourselves out of close, proximal routine? I’m not asking, though it’s framed that way, because your own sense of soon, either as an impending back to normal or still very far from it, will be different.
There’s no too soon for the NBA anymore, as a safeguard that stopped at the start of last season, and as a lingering nudge on the thought process it ceased to exist somewhere between forcing an All-Star on Atlanta where even the Mayor said, firmly, no, and a season riddled with soft tissue injuries and long haul Covid for a handful of players. ‘Too soon’ doesn’t work as a metric when you are trying hard not just to get back to normal, but to construct that normal in your own image on the way there.
I love All-Star for its campiness and facade, how it’s buttoned-down for athletes while stage production goes into overdrive, that it is deeply meaningful but also not very. But for a facade to work well it has to be the one and only falsity, the brightest veneer going, and the NBA has been wearing so many masks since March 2020 that slapping another one on defeats its own purpose. I can’t remember what was underneath all of them to begin with.
Remember last year? I don’t. Not the Dunk Contest, not Anfernee Simons careening through the air in front of a mostly empty arena. Not the gigantic LED screens lit up for Team LeBron and Team Durant, oversized to rule out any lingering trepidation. Not interviews from ten feet away, fans watching from screens courtside on a fake Zoom interface, Mountain Dew dancers masked up and dancing on a wheeled-in stage, Steph Curry alone on court hoisting his 3 Point Contest trophy, unsure how long to hold it there.
It was set up to be a galvanizing catalyst but came to represent doing the wrong thing at precisely the wrong time. Excess over the boring call for simple sense.
It doesn’t seem like I’m going to go to Cleveland. At this point, balancing the money and the logistics, the time window and availability of PCR testing to get there and back again, feels as difficult to navigate as it does, for me, dumb. It isn’t an admonishment for anyone who will go, or me trying to be noble — the difficult thing doesn’t have to be righteous and the right thing doesn’t have to be hard — but I also know that for me, to sit in an arena rigged up with the trappings for a Sprite sponsored skills challenge and all the honest, keening hope and unspooling nerves of the Dunk Contest; or navigating the crush of media before the All-Star Game with each player hoisted up on an panelled podium like a cinematic judge, screaming your same question over and over in hopes that one word snags the ear it’s aimed for, not to mention seeing friends and figuring out how to be together there through all that, none of it would feel like the right, or correct, kind of escape right now. Fantasy and delusion walk a very fine line from bleeding into the other and winter, I remind myself, is an exercise in restraint.
Climbing out of Ashley’s Jeep, back into the day gathering itself up, I feel bright as I do mournful. That mix of flush with contact, little points of your lives palmed and swapped, and coming back into yourself, sighing for it to be over, willfully depleted. To think so minutely about what was normally ordinary, when you’d see so many people in a day due to routine, and then your plans on top of it, is a kind of close and focused perspective I wouldn’t have willed, but don’t mind. Like the sun rising through a window sheeted in frost, each frozen whorl and feather refracting tiny universes of colour, so bright your brain doesn’t let your eyes pan out to give the full picture. Like life, easy to get lost in.