Chapter 3.

Small town culture is good and bad. Everyone knows everyone else. If you’re new, you don’t know the history, you don’t know the stories. A big family moves in, the entire town knows about it. There is a long period of being a new kid. It can make a new kid more interesting than they really are. It took me a while to understand that.

Our family moved at the start of summer. None of us kids wanted to go. We had to leave all we knew, we believed it meant we had to start over, we would be nobodies for a long summer. It was nothing like that. People were really friendly, there was a lot going on. The town had a huge town pool, a great summer rec program, and every kid went. Turned out we didn’t spend that first summer in lonely isolation with each other until the start of the new school year, we fit right in.

I was never a standout. I am the middle child of five kids, I’d have to be exceptional, and I wasn’t. I liked being in the middle. I could hang with my two older sisters, or play with my younger sister and brother, or be on my own. I liked to blend in, to disappear. I read a lot. My favorite books were by Roald Dahl, Laura Ingalls Wilder, E.B. White, Fred Gipson. I imagined I was in those books, I lived in the wild, on prairies, on farms, with talking animals and insects. I knew I was too old to think like that, so I spent a lot of time in my head.

I wasn’t looking for anything the night I went to the basketball courts in the summer of 1976. I was 12. My two older sisters played in the night league, all five of us went because we always travelled in a pack. I wasn’t looking to be special for anyone, not a twenty year old guy who was a referee for the early basketball games, then played in the loud, ferocious games that went on until the lights shut off at ten.

He was instantly overfamiliar, and gave me a nickname. It was strange, the feeling that he knew of me although I had no idea who he was, almost confounding to be called out by this older guy who was like a king on the court, and around the town, and somehow he knew about me. It turned out our families overlapped-he had younger sisters who were my older sisters’ ages.

After that, it felt like he was everywhere I was. Everyone knew him, he was a sports hero, a legend in basketball and baseball. He worked for summer rec, so he was at the pool, he refereed the basketball games, and it was a small town, so I’d see him drive by when I was on my bike. After that first basketball game, he offered to teach me how to shoot a basket, and offered rides when I was walking. Sometimes I’d be with friends, sometimes I’d be on my own.