With 27th the pick in the Basketball Feelings Feelings Draft, Basketball Feelings selects... DREAD
I can feel it leak in with something as innocuous as thinking about shutting the storm windows soon. Removing the narrow, weathered pieces of wood tucked into the corners of this old house’s every sill to prop the thin, sliding panes up through the spring and summer, grooves for the spring loaded latches long gone, and gently lowering the big panels down, sealing ourselves in for six months. Dread at the thought of winter, either winter already or a winter now, through all this. Then a smaller, self-deprecating dread for even letting myself think about it already.
On an island off Tobermory, buffeted on all sides by the blue-green gradient of Lake Huron’s clear water, Dylan and I curved along one winding, thin trail cut by the thousands of feet who took the ferry here before us, who ended up in cedar groves skimmed by sunlight burning through morning fog, or faced sudden walls covered in bright green moss with beads of water clinging to long curling tendrils shot up from the forest floor, or hopefully stopped at the sheer drops facing the lake and the pale, limestone flowerpot formations carved when higher water churned away at the softer parts of the rocks. Who all ended up, like us, forced to keep their eyes down on the trail for fear of tripping over the dense network of tree roots, or large rocks jutting up from damp earth rubbed smooth and slick by so many passing feet, or from toppling over the edge of a cliff for a drop into water in all the places land just abruptly stops, reminds you briskly it’s an island. Who, like us, could only stop to take it in when they quit moving.
A reminder in the way nature will hand it to you that you can’t jettison dread, walk off worry, without trading in your senses, that preoccupied as meditation can help, but might walk you off a cliff.
“What kind of pear is this?” The cashier held it up, not unkindly, mottled green skin with a growing red burnish tilted toward me to help me produce a positive I.D.
My attention slowly circled back from the stacked, bright boxes of LaCroix against the store’s front window, neat rows of idling warm fizz in the sun.
“Oh,” the language of produce escaped me. There are only so many pears on offer in any given store. This store, maybe four kinds. That I couldn’t remember it, but that I’d carefully picked two and left them loose, unbagged, with the bananas, Dylan’s royal gala apples, plantains, a jolt. We looked at each other over our masks. Nothing had really changed in the store to mark time passing besides the cheerful sprawl of fat orange pumpkins now corralled by cornhusks and straw bales in the parking spaces closest to the front doors. It has been bright and crowd controlled since spring, but cases in Toronto had climbed, are climbing. The ritual of grocery shopping — hand sanitizer at the door, passing sidelong in aisles if there’s enough room, otherwise waiting — normalized enough now to have me spacing through the pears. Is it nice not to think about these things as much, is it worse?
“Anjou?” She offered.
“Sure,” I said, the idiot dismay flooded me, “I’m sorry.”
She’d punched them in, was onto the grapefruits.
The thing with Kyle Lowry is he could go anywhere. Philly, Milwaukee, Houston (again), the Clippers, more teams than not need a leader who does it without preamble. Who zeros in on the floor and angles his teammates to where he exactly wants them, where they need to be. This is the first way, the way where it looks like their own idea how they’ve ended up. The second way is a look, the third is a point or a nudge, a firm hand with various gloves on. Lowry could make so many teams that had the wheels come off, that imploded, that rattled and wheezed right out of contention, work again.
To picture him not in Toronto, there’s an understanding, an acceptance out of understanding that whatever choice he’d make, he’d mean it, that it would be for reasons all his own. There’s no pressure anymore. He’s warded it off with a ring.
There’s also a low hum if the head skips forward enough, a preemptive dismay.
What he’s built here, his fingerprints are all over it. Layered and invisible, a team created in his image. Their cooperation, their incisiveness, how carefully they handle one another, their habitual lean to play gritty, maybe ugly basketball, even after they’ve become more balanced than that. Their ingenuity, their grace, how disarming they are with one another in the locker room when the crush of media lightens. All of it speaks to Lowry in echoed call and response of his own love language.
When DeRozan was traded it took until early March of that season for the sting of it to fade for me, even in understanding the new place the arrangement had cleared for the team, where it put them. In talking about, mostly around, the possibility that Lowry could leave I’ve rationalized that for how hard I took the DeRozan news — the way it was done, the empty assurance just prior, the cold sense of it — my heart has since hardened in recovering from the gouge of it. But if we’re ascribing players to parts of the team’s collective body then Lowry is the heart, extract him and the form is still there but all propulsion is gone. He’s the engine of its joy as much as he has been the constant, steady recipient of all its collective grief. He is history, snarling around on two unshakeable, firmly planted legs.
The morning the car got stolen every possibility sounded its own small alarm. Would it get found? When, and what might it look like? What if it didn’t? It probably wouldn’t. We couldn’t really get another one any time soon. Then cycling back to: Was it random, targeted? I’d read about relay equipment people could use for push starts, standing in front of houses if the fob was close enough to the door with what looked like a boom mic. The dread of it being random felt lighter, more evenly spread.
We walked blocks around the neighbourhood, pressing the panic button, feeling like every corner, every new street, we’d see it, but what would that be like?
Responding to crisis with a small exercise in control says more about me than anything else but, that afternoon I carefully packed up mugs I’d made and been meaning to mail cross-country and we walked to the post office in Shoppers Drug Mart. I put in a prescription while we were there and we left the store to do a lap under gathering slate grey clouds. We went east, toward a small corner garden store we drove by often that had baskets of bright, small gourds out, a good and sad distraction. Two blocks in and we looked south, stopped, looked at each other.
“Is that…” We trailed off. I tried to zoom my phone’s ancient camera on the new provincial issue plates. We crossed the road, weirdly nearly tip-toeing. Dylan read the plate out loud, asked me for confirmation of what he’d just said, what we both were seeing. The strange, close to out-of-body experience of looking in a back window and seeing the dogs hairy blanket spread out across the bench seat.
We’d found it? We hardly felt sure but here it was.
We called the police to tell them we were taking it home. They said no, get away from it. Someone will be sent. We stood at the top of the street watching our car, parked in front of a fire hydrant, as the temperature fell and rain started. We waited. Hours later we called again. A busy day, low priority, someone soon.
I was supposed to call Josh Hart to talk about wine. Dylan and I assured each other it had likely been ditched, no one was coming back, and I ran home in the rain. Soaking, prepping questions, constantly refreshing Dylan’s location pin in his contact, shaking. Dylan called. He’d confronted the thief. Twenty minutes after I’d left. He looked away, looked back and the guy was about to slip into the driver’s side. Dylan pressed the panic button, bound toward the car, lungs filled up with adrenalin. Two movers down the street dropped their boxes in the middle of the road in the rain to watch, inch closer. The guy shot his hands up, startled, ran off. An hour after that, somebody finally came.
We sat at home as the Finals started, talking backward over the afternoon. Exploding on the TV, LeBron James seemed too bullying for us, just then. Who does this happen to? Other people, we agreed, everyone else. Jimmy Butler came down weird on an ankle, Dragic’s foot tore on the most unassuming half-step, Bam, who warmed up wearing a big, flashing medallion that thumped his sternum with every jumper, took a hit to the shoulder and the casual way he will spread open even the most minuscule space around the basket to saunter, swan through, snapped back like an elastic. I fell asleep on the couch before the half, in bed after it. The fallout of dread, lingering trepidation, curling into my chest like a cat that’s finally made itself comfortable.
Even if it weren’t rife with symbols of the very same, fall is a time to shed. To dig and settle and shudder within yourself, like an animal shaking itself nose to tail, wringing out every muscle as a measure and means to soothe. George does it every time we come home from a walk. Like he’s loosening the outside world from his wound up little body, same as you’d take off your coat, slip on your inside clothes. A demarcation ritual for control, even the illusion of it.
What does it mean to stay this vigilant, some soft-focused awareness whenever you leave the house, for this long, this frequently? In a self help book I read recently that dealt in the act of centring yourself in a world pretty consistently trying to knock you one way or the other, the sole focus was to lessen your reactions. Float up, don’t sink down. Let go, don’t hold on. Trying to take control of everything all the time is like using your hands to settle ripples in water, you’ll only force more.
But all this lightness, all this release, how does it serve in a time when we’re barred from so much close contact, from the bodies we used to respond best to, from holding on and touching.
Low-level dread humming like a frequency in the background at all times. Like a dryer, the rhythmic whirr of a ceiling fan. What I worry is, will it be like white noise, when we’re without it? When you finally switch the fan off in cooling weather and the whole room stills, quiet for the first time in months, or when the dryer buzzes and you startle, before being left with a smothering silence, all too aware of the irregularity of your own breathing, your body, everything you’ve slid under the continuity of pliable sound to tidy, to get it out of the open.
Our landlord, who lives on the main floor of our place, is an opera singer and voice studies professor. He’s back teaching and it’s all remote, which he’s lamented to us he doesn’t particularly like. But there are moments in the day where his voice, running through rising scales, or a in single note, a booming tenor of triumph, travels up through the floor into our apartment and I’ll pause whatever I’m doing — dishes, writing, reading in the bath to heat my whole body up, chugging water over the sink — and hold my breath, feel my anxieties shudder, caught in the vibration of the note as if in gossamer threads of a delicate web, and gently extract from me.