Thursday, May 27, 2010

passages from a fictional memoir (part 2)

(cont. from may 26th)
.........It reminds me how later that day I stood on another pile of snow (the yard was stacked several feet, still the tallest storm I've ever seen) and walked to where the basketball hoop stood up to it's neck ( the pole's neck I should say, just under where the octogon was attached). I leaned over and touched the strings. I knew this would only happen once. I'd never be a basketball player, let alone someone who could dunk, so what was waiting for me? I wasn't even a fan of sports, and I hoped, thinking this when I was eleven, I wouldn't ruin my life and turn into a janitor. So this was the first and maybe only time I'd ever pull these looped, knotted strings. I can't even remember if I stuck a ball through them. I must have, why not? But for that moment I pulled the strings. It may seem inconsequential, as slight as those little cloths a little thicker than my shoe laces, bit tied tighter than my bathroom belt I'm wearing right now. But so often in the years we do things dozens of times, like taking the same route on a train or walking into the same bathroom on the fourth floor of an office building that used to be a factory and is now a storage facility, and we do other things only once that we don't know fate and nature has slapped a period on, like finishing Moby dick with the hope of rereading it one day, the restaurant in Florida with the best quesadillas you've ever tried (crispy bread, peppers and ricotta cheese without a hint of spice) for which you lose the address and title for, and a pretty paramour, or two, I've lived a long life--that how often do we get to do something for one time only, and know it is the last we'll get to feel it in our ungloved dry fingers. Oh right, flights to china. Maybe if you’re lucky a hike up Kilimanjaro. But how often do you get to feel that foreign taste in your front yard. Perhaps that sentiment of getting all that I need from my immediate space was why I didn't travel much. Or led this page slim life?

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