Basketball

BASKETBALL
BASKETBALL JONES did not play basketball. Or any other sport, for that matter. Nor was his name a nick-name. His parents had chosen it simply because they liked the sound of the syllables playing off each other. No dreams or ambitions; no hopes or aspirations. Just the pleasing touch to their ears: Basketball.
Mr. and Mrs. Jones lived on the Puget Sound. They loved to go down to the beach at low tide and watch the tide slowly come in with the little waves. They loved to watch the other people who would gather at the beach to watch the same thing as they. They loved to go down to the waterfront in the evenings too to watch the sunset. To sit on the pilings. And to be with the other people who had also come down to watch one of the many beautiful things that take place every day on the planet. To the north was Mt. Baker, 10,775 feet above sea level and covered in snow, even in August. Mr. and Mrs. Jones wondered if Mt. Baker’s elevation was measured at low tide or at high tide.
Basketball Jones met a bum on the boardwalk on September 12. The bum asked him not if he had any spare change, but, rather, if he had a twenty-dollar bill. Basketball said, No, he didn’t have a twenty-dollar bill (which was the truth), but added that he did have some change, if that would help. But the bum was not interested in his change. He was not even interested in Basketball Jones’s twenty-dollar bill, except as an illustration, and he would have given it back to him when he was done with it. So instead, he said, "Let me show you something." And he took from his own wallet his own twenty-dollar bill, folded it--one, two, three times--so that, finally, the image of the Twin Towers played on the money.
"See," he said. "Proof. The U.S. Government was behind it all along."
Mr. and Mrs. Jones loved nature. They loved nature so much that they read books on the subject. They loved the ocean especially--the movement of the tides. But they loved the mountains too and the inching forward of the glaciers and then their receding back up the mountain. And the sky too they loved, and its clockwise rotation. (Or maybe it was counter-clockwise; Mr. and Mrs. Jones could never agree on that one.) They loved the shape--the big round shape of the sky’s biggest objects, the sun and the moon. And the changing phases of the moon (and its pull on the ocean) and the circular sun (and its pull on the ocean). And the parts of the sun as well: the core and the photosphere and the chromosphere and the corona and the solar wind.
Once, after having read some things in a book, they asked a teacher: "How big is the sun?"
The teacher had replied that it all depends; it all depends on your definition of the sun.
When most people think of the sun, he said, what they’re referring to is the photosphere, the outline of what you can see with a special solar filter (or even just a welder’s glass). But there is also the chromosphere, the corona (which you can see only during an eclipse), and the solar wind (which you can’t see at all, but which reaches all the way out to the edge of the solar system). So that, the instructor said, if you consider it from the perspective of the solar wind, you could say that we live not only on the earth, but also inside the sun. The earth and the sun are the same, in that they both take up the same space at the same time.
Back before September 12, way back before he knew anything about the power of money--or the enormous size of the sun--Basketball Jones learned about the secrets one could find in wishes. He knew--because he had been told--that there was nothing in the world that you could not do but that your mind could will it. For example, he had been told by a friend, Kathy Friend, of a secret way to get rid of warts: She could wish them away. Basketball had a little cluster of six warts on the inside of his left elbow that resembled the Pleiades and that he always kept covered by his shirt. He didn’t like them, he was embarrassed by them, and he did not want anyone to see them. His friend Kathy had told him that she had once had four warts on her thumb, and that one day, when she had finally had it with them, she looked at them harshly. She had glared at them obtusely. She had even gone so far as to talk to them. Angrily. And with great malice aforethought. She had said to the warts, "Go away, warts. I don’t want you here. No one wants you here. Just go away!" Nothing happened, of course: the warts did not go away. Nor did Kathy expect them to. Not immediately, anyway. But that did not stop her from hating them. She grew more bold and aggressive in her hatred: "Go away!" she now shouted. "I hate you. I hate you. Get off my body. I hate you more." And she glared at the warts again and again, and she seethed at them and focused all of her hatred on the warts--her growing hatred growing, her angering, loathing thoughts shouting at the warts, "I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. Now go!"
Within a week they were gone.
Basketball tried the same strategy, and it worked for him as well. He became a believer.
Mr. and Mrs. Jones had little pet names for each other. Nick- names, you might say. And lots of them: Pun’kin, Tool, Trailer-tootie. When they did the dishes together, Mr. Jones would call Mrs. Jones Paper, and she’d call him Orange. When they cleaned the house, he’d call her Antithesis, and she’d call him Camera. When they worked in the garden, it was Ocean and Golf, sometimes Clarinet or Raining or just plain God. And when they made love, he’d call her Alphabet, and she’d just make a little gurgle in the back of her throat that did not have any letters in it at all. It was a sound that Mr. Jones could not duplicate, try as he might. But he loved it nonetheless--loved it entirely, perhaps because he could not duplicate it--and he called her Alphabet–-or sometimes just Pha--many times during their love making, which usually lasted a long time. Which is how they liked it. Of course. And how it should be. Of course. The names didn’t mean a lot; they were not symbolic or figurative in any way. And their friends were puzzled by them. They themselves didn’t know what they meant either. But it provided amusement for them, and they enjoyed the ambiguity and the playfulness of it all; and it probably helped keep their marriage intact. Their communication moving. Their hatred in check. Doodle. Bottle Rocket. Participate. And Buddy.
Basketball had no nick-names; not for want of friends (who are usually the ones to pronounce those types of things), but just because his friends seemed to know that Basketball was enough. He was accepted for who he was–-and for what he was--at face value. Not for what anyone thought he was (how people may have tried to interpret--or misinterpret--him) or for what language can too often do to the truth. He was just--Basketball. No strings attached. He did, however, have one little secret that no one knew. And so it would be highly inappropriate to reveal it here.