Full circle, same place
It was our third hour in the car, maybe. The day was bright and cold, the week up to then had brought two days of snow that meant it, snow that sticks, and it was only Wednesday. We were staring at the building, a two-story emergency hospital with walls in alternating stucco panels of salmon, Easter chick yellow and terracotta. In the big window on the second floor that showed a slice of the internal stairwell we watched doctors and vet techs rush up and amble down. I’d let my eyes soften their focus to the reflection of the large white clouds overhead rushing past on the same pane of glass, perfectly framed, blue of the late April sky a promise and a warning.
We talked around the obvious thing — Captain was in there — because we could only circle back and say out loud the obvious thing — Captain was in there — so many times in the passing hours and without knowing how long we’d be there we were also pacing ourselves.
This place looks like it belongs in a commercial plaza in Phoenix.
Do you think that’s an x-ray machine up there? Where you can see the top of that guy’s head?
We left the parking lot, filled with other people waiting in their cars, to drive around the long residential blocks so the car could charge my phone, so they could call us with an update.
Do you think he’s scared?
If you dropped me off here I’d have no idea what direction to walk in.
We both grew up in Scarborough but driving around Scarborough you forget how sprawling, how big, how many lives tucked there in tidy cul-de-sacs and loping, rangy blocks. Every pocket looking a little different than the one on the other side of the main street that carves them into tidy rectangles by way of map alone.
We alternated who called at the top of every hour. We made stories up about the people in the other cars, tried to match the vet techs leaving at shift change to the empty cars in the lot.
When we got there, Dylan lifted Captain from the backseat and he cried out until his paws tentatively touched asphalt. The tech who triaged him looped a blue nylon lead around his neck and he tried to turn back around under the makeshift hanging plexiglass partition now dividing the vestibule from where we could follow and where we couldn’t.
We ate drive thru Whoppers, felt awful for a different reason at least for a little bit. We drove to my parents house to pee, felt the evening come on for how the sun slipped off our faces, held hands over the gear shift when the vet finally called
In the absence of catching up at games it’s been a year for catching up around Zoom scrums. Texting with friends as we wait for players, strangely more present than we would be with each other in person when there’s always the possibility of a visiting player walking in from the bus looking lost, an opportunity to grab a coach or a trainer at the edge of the court, our eyes always roving an inch too far from each other’s faces in the tell-tale indicator that makes the other person pause and turn their head. Would make you feel worse for being found out if they weren’t doing it too.
Now we can ask about redecorating, comment on coach and player mood real time, complain, ask how the other person is doing, knowing nobody has anywhere to run off to.
I miss in-person for its pull of habit, an arena’s small centres of insular gravity. This week I told someone on a team’s staff I missed hearing their voice, blurted it out of nowhere, as they admitted to missing the unrelenting food crumbs on the media room tablecloths.
I knew what they meant.
The past year has inverted what used to be mundane into precious anomaly. At first it felt weird, our languishing brains and fried nervous systems out of practice and offering an outsized response. Now, no matter how disproportionate, I mean it. I understand my limits better than I ever have. I understand that I am the kind of person that can miss crumbs the same way I miss feeling my pulse go thudding against my chest as a player nods me over for an interview. That in these new, multi-tasking windows of layering conversations over game questions, where someone answers, I’m not so good this week right after I listened to them get their question in, the loss of the physical gravity of being there, standing right next to them, makes the weight of this other type of admitting all the more important.
It was a week’s worth of year-long conversations.
On a call with someone from the league’s head office and she tentatively asked how things were up here when a year ago, almost to the day, it was me asking the same concerned, uncertain question about “down there”. A bizarre, unsettling, frustrating and still grateful full-circle.
In the dark, after whispering, half-asleep, should we take him back to the emergency clinic, after Dylan got up off the floor from lying with him, after Captain woke us up with his plaintive, pained cries, I wedged an arm down against his chest and the pillow we’d put on his bed on the floor to elevate his head. His rapid breathing eventually deepening. When my arm went numb and I shifted, he woke, so I would reposition myself to have a hand on him, careful of the strain in his back the vet said had started the whole thing. It was a long and mostly awake night and while I fixated on his breath, thinking what’s one out of all the nights this year that have tumbled into mornings, unmarked, time without a sense of progress or purpose. Here at least I was made to be aware of it again, that it was still capable of passing far too slow.
(And in his speedy recovery over the last couple days, aware of time’s return to its pandemic warp.)
Switching winter clothes to spring, thinning out everything for donation that I’d once had as “work clothes”, or that I couldn’t picture myself in, not the same person who’d last worn most of it. Texting photos to a friend, did she want this? Sure, she said, so long as I didn’t mind defeating the purpose and holding onto it for however many months until we could see each other again.
When Zion sat for his postgame in New York this week and broke out in a smile so big it rocked him backwards after being asked what it was like to finally play in the Garden. The Knicks own cosmic return aside, Williamson, who’d had his first season riddled with injury, stops and starts, who never got to play in this place in what was supposed to be his and the game’s biggest season in some time? Ever? Who still hasn’t had a streamlined season in the league, let alone New Orleans. Maybe there’s some future-telling there, but maybe he was just excited to mark a moment he’d always wanted. So much of his short career has been excessive speculation on the shape and all the possibilities of his future.
He shrugs one, two, three times, talks about the city, remembers to mention New Orleans, seems to grin at something beyond the camera, beyond the question. Let him have a single season, some ease of the present, before he’s back to carrying the weight of his future.
Talking about the playoffs, the postseason, my first thought is a confused how, before mentally cycling back through the months that have passed, the requisite number of games adding up to make up whatever we’re going to call this anything but “regular” season. Weren’t we just here? While I find it hard to gather my excitement for the playoffs, I find it harder to picture the stretch of time coming after, where basketball, so much a metronome to this past year aside from a blip of maybe four weeks where we didn’t talk about it everyday and six weeks before we saw it again, will finally come to a juddering halt.
What will Covid mean for new deals, for free agency? How do you write the toll of the last year on player’s bodies, minds, or their families into contracts? Will it be structured like bird rights, however many years in the event of ongoing symptoms? We all have reasons to want to move on from the last year but the idea of not building it into contracts as some bound and formalized weight makes moving forward feel like erasure, a tidy annulment on everything it’s already, pretty cruelly, redacted.
Sitting apart from a friend in a park between our places we watched kids with a parent, kids alone, kids all different ages climb a hill to hurtle themselves shrieking back down it. That was the only game. Climb, lurch for a minute in velocity’s reverse, surrender. Until they eventually all got dragged away there was no pause or hesitation. There’s an analogy here, but I guess at the moment I’m not sure which way we’re going.