The season for dreamers

The WNBA peaking, the NBA rousing from dormant, and the necessary discomfort of idling.

One of the most disorienting things about moving has to be the strange suspension of your life within its physically narrowest parameters, that is, your own home. Going from the one that, whether you especially liked or not, still bound and padded and immersed you in walls of your own making. All your rituals set and arranged, all the furnishings of those rituals set and arranged, the sense that you could stay in and do nothing because everything is right there. Moving inverts that. Suddenly, the sense is you can stay in but there’s nothing to do. There is no terrarium of comfort and self, it’s either still packed away or in that half out, half lost, half no-place-for-yet limbo. You drift from room to room, making lists of all there is to do that vanish by the time you make it to the next doorway. You feel, at least I really do, a submergence into uselessness. Stalled out. A hundred things to start and no idea where.

Drifting at least feels easy in the new neighbourhood. All the side streets off the humming main where our building is hold giant old houses hunkered down under hundred year old trees, set back from the street and fronted by palatial lawns and gardens tended by a person whose full-time job it is to consider the seasons, the light, the colour scheme. I’ve started taking walks with the dogs in the evenings, when the air cools, down winding roads that shift from pavement into cobbled red brick. Most of the streets don’t have sidewalks, there’s hardly anybody else out walking, it’s quiet, we linger.

At the end of one of these big front lawns one evening, set close to the curb, a cardboard box stacked with books. Also a Wii, but that seems somehow more archaic than the 1983 edition of Shame I pick up and flip over. In our old neighbourhood in the east end of the city everyone put stuff out on the curbs in front of their houses (the curbs were the front of most houses), here, it’s the first time I’ve seen it. Shuffling through each book and re-stacking them as I go I realize I haven’t read in over a week. It doesn’t feel like there’s anywhere at home to do it.

By the time I’m done going through the box I feel something like settled. I tuck the two paperbacks under my elbow and tug the dogs up from where they’ve lain down on the lawn. I bring the books home and set them on top of the dozen plus stacked boxes of my own books, unpacked.

---

I’ve been thinking about expectations. Mine, of myself. Mine, of other people. Mine, of other people that I am not as quick to apply to myself.

I catch myself in disappointment, in frustration, in anger, in sudden bouts of clenching sadness, in shaking-off heaves of contentment. I catch myself and try my best to hold there, to work through the whys and hows of where I’ve ended up and why I got there. The sense of drifting has extended into feelings, too, and it’s not such a bad thing to stop and consider the action/reaction of things, sometimes.

The fall is always a reckoning for me. Even if nothing is very overt, no sudden upheavals, there’s always change. Every tapering, little bit mournful end of summer I know it’ll happen and every time I’m still surprised by it. I’m sure I’ve written about it here before, too.

In basketball fall is the same. The WNBA season speeding toward a title winner, the NBA season feeling close enough to starting that speculation goes from unfounded to forming. Women’s basketball culminating in peak form, stakes and performance, men’s camps close, the first opportunity to glimpse, so peripherally it’ll be more an impression than anything made tangible, potential.

The two leagues peaking and convalescing simultaneously a very concentrated, accelerated, albeit circumscribed scale of the seasons shifting.

The expectations of a basketball season, in this time, the closest they’ll ever get to a free pass of promise. It can’t be helped if predictions for Aces-Sun get wholly out of hand, succumb to fully feverish, because that is what this brief window of possibility is for. The justification is in what all’s already happened these playoffs — Courtney Williams going full-throttle, Chelsea Gray describing her cold calculated, near-premonitional aptitude for nailing impossible shots simply with “It feels nice”, Sue Bird saying goodbye — their stakes nailed high by history: the Sun with the second most wins in WNBA history and no title, the Aces (and Becky Hammon) very much meaning to write some of their own.

Where the WNBA will work to squeeze the last out of a season, like heat in September that comes dogged and dazed, the NBA goes from fallow to functioning in the same canicular haze. September into mid-October is always such a forgiving stretch. Actuals of the season still far enough off that no forecast can really be blamed for accuracy and the expectations are less rigid, or impossibly stratospheric, than the prospect just to watch again — specific people, their action, rhythm.

No rookie’s been labelled a disappointment yet, against whatever arbitrary measurement there is for the heady tandem of potential and promise. No one’s been hurt. No team has come out too hot, or with fundamentals so tightly wound their success seems robotic until they rattle apart. No one has made you doubt.

It is, in a basketball calendar, the season for dreamers. A rare span of drifting. To take takes apart and then wander away, forgetting about them as you go, not hindered at all by their (already imaginary) weight on you or how, three months from now, any knee-jerk response you have to an opinion opposite yours might wield the power to take your happiness out at the knees.

Hard as they are to process, or live in, it’s important to have the in-betweens. These buffer pockets of time separating what’s happened and what’s next, to feel loose, upended, even incapable. To catch yourself out of patterns, habits, places, past versions of yourself and to rummage around in what’s strange, new or looming, delve into the discomfort it can bring. It’s not limbo, because it won’t last. It’s more like insulation. What you’ll shore yourself up with from now until the next time you have to tear it all down again.

---

The light in the new place is good, but the same as it is with learning people, I don’t yet know the best angles to catch it and when to be sure I’m looking.

In the mornings, if it’s clear, the kitchen windows and the tops of the skinny oaks that brush up against the glass get edged in a tremulous, watery light. In the late afternoons, if the shower curtain is pulled over a little, then light shoots in from the rectangle window in the shower that looks out over a tier of tennis courts and their parking lot, passing over the wide sand ceramic tiles and onto the warm parquet floor in the hall, hugging to the baseboards. In the evenings when I’ve found myself, often, still working at the kitchen table, balcony door swung open and with a lamp I pulled out of a box scrawled with “living room” plugged into the wall for light, I can watch the sky go from one soft gradient to the next as the day sinks. Mauve and peach, blush and salt blue, finally a wash of all of them that the eyes don’t really know how to work out. The light of between, before now and the next.