I wrote “A Hoosier
Christmas” years ago. It’s much too long for a blog post [4300 words], so I
have broken it into four parts. I’ll post one part each day. By the time I am
ready to take a Christmas break from blogging, you will have the whole thing.
So, you can either read one part each day, or wait until Thursday, Dec. 22, and
scroll down to Dec. 19 and read the whole thing by scrolling back up to the
22nd.
JRMcF
A HOOSIER CHRISTMAS--1954
PART I
It was three on two. I was almost good enough to be on the short
side of an odd-man game, but not quite.
It was David and John and me against Philip and Kenny. We were beating them and crowing about it.
"Aw, man...," they
whined. "This doesn't mean
nothin'. It's only 'cause you've got
three guys. Two on two, we'd take you
any day."
They had a lot of pride at
stake. They were twelve; John and I were
just eleven, and David was only nine.
It would never have occurred to us
to leave one "man" out for a game so the sides were even. When you played, you played with what you
had--the kids, the weather, the court.
Those were just the variables; no one really cared about them. The game was the thing. All you really needed was the ball.
We played in snow storms with
mittens on, in rain so hard we couldn't see the basket, in heat so intense we
couldn't grip the ball because of the sweat running down our arms. We played in rutted hog lots, in garages so
narrow that every shot was from the corner, against barn sides that threatened
a concussion every time you dared to drive to the basket. We played with fathers, cousins, uncles,
friends, strangers. We played wearing
stocking caps in winter, straw sombreros in summer, clodhopper high-tops or
pointed-toe "street" shoes or four-buckle galoshes or P.F.
Flyers. We played "horse" and
"pig" and odds and evens and shirts-and-skins. We played when the only others out were
"mad dogs and Englishmen," when the moon was high enough we could see
the rim and when it was so low we could judge if a ball were in or out only by
the sound. We were Hoosiers. We played basketball.
"Ha!" David grunted.
"You couldn't take us with a ten-foot pole and the Fort Wayne
Zolner Pistons to boot."
"When I get a ball to practice
with, then you'll wish you were in the morgue," I predicted.
I had two obsessions that year--the
morgue, which figured prominently in the radio mystery shows we listened to on
Sunday afternoons, and getting my own basketball.
I started a drive for the basket that ended
with the first bounce as the ball caromed wildly away. Kenny's barnyard was never smooth enough to
return a dribbled ball anywhere near the player who tried it, and the early
December freeze had hardened every rut and hoof-print into concrete.
"Big talk," yelled Philip,
grabbing my boot-ball and heaving it in the general direction of the bankboard.
"You could practice all day and not hit the side of a barn with a
twelve-gauge shotgun."
"Yeah, you could practice all
day and still not be able to catch a cold."
We played basketball with our feet
and with our legs and with our hands, but especially with our mouths.
*********
I walked the two miles home from
Kenny's house. The dark was gathering
earlier every night as we headed toward the shortest day of the year. Normally the darkness hid a whole rag-tag
army of fears and dreads. They were
accompanied by a sound-track of wind in dead sassafras leaves and echoes of my
own steps on the hard-frozen gravel.
Tonight, though, I wasn't even thinking about the anxieties that
normally dogged my steps in the dark. I
felt good.
I had been on the winning side, even if it had been three on two. Better yet, Christmas was coming, and I knew
I was going to get a basketball. Having
your own basketball defeats a whole host of fears.
*********
We didn't play basketball during
recess at school. Only the older boys
got to do that. There were just two
baskets, and unless you were in the seventh grade you were never chosen for the
ten on ten melees that churned over the broken blacktop like a cat-and-dog
fight in the funny papers. We younger
boys pitched washers and commented on how poorly the chosen twenty played.
"Shit fire," exclaimed
John. "If I couldn't shoot any
better than that, I'd quit school and move to Kentucky."
"Those guys don't know whether
to shoot or get off the pot," smirked Philip.
"They never even heard of
defense," muttered Kenny."
"If I had my own ball, they'd
wish they were in the morgue," said I.
Of course, none of these comments
were stated loudly enough that they could be heard either by Mrs. Mason, as she
made her rounds of the playground, or by the seventh grade boys as they
profaned the art and drama of basketball.
Since sixth graders and lesser life
forms could not play at school, and since I did not have my own ball, I could
participate in the magic only by going to the home of one of my friends when I
knew they were getting a game up. That
was not easily done. We lived in the
country and did not have a car.
Sometimes, if my father did not need the horse for farm work, I could
borrow a saddle from Mr. Heathman, our closest neighbor, and ride "Old
Prince" to where the action was.
Old Prince, however, was almost always hitched to a wagon or rake or cultivator
plow. So, I walked--a mile or two or
three…
********
Being the newest kid on Jimmy Bigham's bus
route, I got the seat over the hole in the floor, which corresponded with the
window that was stuck in the half-open position in the winter and the half-closed
position in the spring and fall. It was
a great air-conditioning system, except that in hot weather the air was laden
with dust, and in the winter it circulated a chill breeze that was often laced
with slush. From that strange vantage
point I watched them, the boys and their basketballs. It seemed that every boy in the county had a
basketball of his own. That is, every
boy in the county but me. They would be
shooting baskets when the bus pulled up in the morning. Some of them even had backboards that existed
for the sole purpose of basketball, rather than doubling as the side of a barn;
that was impressive! When Jimmy gave his
impatient two hoots on the horn, they knew they had been seen and could now
casually toss the ball aside, letting it lie there and wait until the bus
returned them in the evening. Then I
would look back and watch them as they scored two or six or even ten points
against some imaginary foe before the bus had even pulled out of sight.
"If I had a ball of my own,
you'd wish you were in the morgue," I would grumble at them, to
myself.
How could they be so cavalier about
those balls, I wondered, just leaving them outside all day like that? Probably
even left them out all night, to be sure there would be no hold-up in the
morning when it came time to shoot again.
Certainly wouldn't want to be caught with no ball to shoot when the
school bus was coming. If I has a ball
of my own, I'd take care of it, and I certainly wouldn't show off with it, not
me! I'd practice and practice, in
secret, and then suddenly I would appear on the scene, shooting shots that no
one had ever seen before, becoming a star before they even knew I had a
ball. Ah, but first I had to get my
hands on one of those "marvelous, magical spheroids" for myself.
We actually talked like that, even
when we played.
********
"Toss me the spheroid,"
Philip would yell.
"If you want the golden globe,
learn to rebound," came Kenny's retort.
"Intercept that projectile,"
John would instruct me.
"If I had a rounded ellipsoid
of my own, you'd wish you were in the morgue," I said.
We had little idea what those words
meant, except for "globe," but we learned them because we were avid
readers of "The Great Scism” [Dan] who wrote the sports column to which we
were addicted. For some reason, the
sports writers in our time and place felt it was a loss of face to refer to
"the old pig bladder," as a ball.
They would try anything to avoid calling the "mystical
balloon" by its given name. Reading them gave us a well-rounded
education. We learned history,
mythology, folklore, music, astronomy, science, Bible--all from the pages of
the sports section. Furthermore, we
thought those were the words that normal people used about basketball, so we
spoke them as we played, dribbling the "majestic moon" trough hog
manure, shooting the "amazing atom" at the side of a barn. Needless to say, we also learned the allure
of alliteration.
My entire vocabulary was shaped by
the ethos of basketball. I recall
listening to Paul Burns, the local postmaster and a lay minister, preach one Sunday
morning in the Forsythe Methodist Church.
"Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner," was his text. I heard it as "Lord, have mercy on me, a
center." I carefully to the sermon
but could not figure out why centers were more in need of mercy than guards and
forwards. This was especially disturbing
since I was growing fast and assumed I would be a center.
To me, they were all wonderful words,
because they all meant basketball. I ran
them over in my head in the hard cold of that dark December evening, savoring
them as I walked home, for I knew, as sure as I could be, that I was going to
get a basketball from Uncle Ted and Aunt Nora for Christmas.
TO BE CONTINUED
TOMORROW
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