Howdy,
#NaNoWriMo (550) — Day 8
(Unedited, or only slightly)
Continued …
Practicing in the evenings — every evening — and over the weekend any time that wasn’t church and lunch with Grandma had Jake feeling pretty confident on Monday about bringing out his game on the playground at school.
He did feel confident, but in his mind more because he found himself in a good groove from spending so much time on the court exercising his skills, happy to be doing something he loved. It wasn’t practice to him. Not like others think of it. Something that you have to do.
Jake enjoyed it. All of it, everything surrounding the game of basketball, wanting to play every minute. He’d wear someone out, who wasn’t used to keeping up with him. He certainly didn’t consider his efforts on the court practice.
No, the time spent dribbling, shooting, and passing especially if he had his dad or someone else to throw to but also off objects like thick trees or fixed light poles or sides of brick buildings while walking a street to or from a hoop wasn’t practice. Not to Jake.
In fact, Jake was one who didn’t even have an idea of “practice.” Others’ tainted idea, from coached practice equally work. Being one who’d never played on an organized team, Jake Jones longed for practice; ready to eat up the work, no doubt seeing it all as a time to be on a court, or much better yet, IN A GYM.
Jake barely dared to dream: practicing in a gym, on a team.
When he did think about it, Jake got excited to be a part of a basketball program running drills and plays, putting in schemes on defense for locking down the next opponent on their schedule.
He wasn’t afraid of a little sweat, either. Running lines, or suicides as some called them, wouldn’t scare him off. Jake never considered himself fast, but he could run, as in keep running. On the court he played and played, running up and down the court. And he’d do it all summer-day long. Running and sweating. B balling and loving it.
So Jake walked confidently into a new week, certain he’d play well in a short pick up game at recess or over the longer lunch break — when he’d swallow his sacked food fast and jet out to the blacktop. He hoped to get picked early, really just even at all, by the playground captains in his class, the athletic boys who’d obviously been leaders with the rest for a few years. It didn’t take Jake Jones long to learn who they were. But they still didn’t know him.
Jake wanted to change that at school with his play on the court.
Jake couldn’t believe it: rain. Water drops started streaking down the classroom window shortly before morning recess that Monday. It only grew more intense, pounding down on the sidewalks, by the time the bell rang.
There’d be no going outside to hoop that morning. At the bell, Jake tapped his pencil eraser against his desk and tossed it into the air in anxious frustration. He fumbled his attempt to catch the rotating pencil: sharpened end, rubber eraser, sharpened end, rubber eraser, sharpened end …
He’d stabbed himself with its writing end before. Pencil sticking in, standing upright from his palm for a beat … before falling sidewise and snapping off. The vicious point leaving a chunk of pencil lead, graphite, to be dug out as well as a long lasting gray trace of a wound.
To be continued …
—Billy
Reading. Writing. Living.
Please subscribe to mailing list for the Reading Writing Living journey we’re on and get the goodies that’ll come from time to time with my newsletter. Thank you.