Two days after the season finale—the night before I was set to leave for St. Croix—I got a text from my sister Kim around 10 p.m.
Mom is in ER with cardiac issues. She’s doing ok. Call me as I’m here and awake ;)
All iPhones should disable the use of emoticons in texts containing the words “cardiac” and “ER.” I called my sister right away to confirm that everything was in fact okay (and express my displeasure with her liberal use of the winky face), and she reassured me that Mom was indeed fine. Earlier that night my mom complained of shortness of breath, and when Kim took her blood pressure (my sister used to be a physical therapist and had a cuff lying around the house) it was high enough to merit a trip to the emergency room. Thankfully, all the tests for heart issues—enzymes, EKG, echocardiogram, stress test—came back negative, and when I got my mom on the line she implored me to go to the islands as planned. But I didn’t feel right jetting off to the Caribbean with my mom in the hospital, and so I postponed the trip to visit her in the hospital outside Philadelphia. We spent Saturday afternoon together watching playoff basketball—just like old times, but on a grainy television with the sound playing through a bedside remote control. If anyone was going to have a heart attack at the end of the season, odds are it would have been me, I joked. The doctors reassured me that everything was okay, and so I kissed my mom goodbye and left for St. Croix the next morning.
For the next four days I let the memories of the season drift away in the balmy island air. I had booked the trip with the miles I accumulated over the course of the year with the notion of taking a few days to reflect on the 82-game journey—fruit of the poisonous tree, as it were—but I had nothing left for introspection. I could only forget. I stayed in a small cottage on the east end of the island next to a small kite surfing shop. During the days I snorkeled in the turquoise shallows, alone with the sound of my breath, and at night I fell asleep to the sound of the waves lapping against the rocky shores of the beach.
On the last day I decided that I couldn’t come to St. Croix without looking for Clyde. I drove around Green Cay, an “estate” (the island is divided into a patchwork of these miniature counties) where some quick Googling seemed to point to the location of his offseason home. I didn’t have an address, and I passed a lot of oceanfront properties with rambling gardens of red and pink azaleas, any of which could have belonged to the man known to the locals as Walt. I drove some of the streets in the neighborhood, looking for a man in a t-shirt driving a beat-up truck, and finally headed back to the main road toward the airport.
In the crowded one-room terminal, I checked the weather in New York. Forty-five degrees. The last remnants of the winter season.
For the first time in six months I took to the courts on 38th Street and shot a basketball. Back in November, as the Knicks were embarking on an early-season seven-game losing streak, I sprained my ankle playing a game of three-on-three on the Astoria playgrounds. The injury kept me out through the winter. But […]
Tonight I am a believer in the basketball gods. The Knicks win in Atlanta—their second consecutive road win for the first time this season—had to have been preordained. There is no other rational explanation. How else can you explain Langston Galloway pouring in a career-high 26 points on perfect 6-for-6 three-point shooting? Or Quincy Acy’s […]
If the Knicks lose out on the first pick in the draft I will never forgive Tim Hardaway. It might have been the worst basketball game I’ve seen in my life. The Knicks outscored Orlando eight to seven—eight to seven!—in the second quarter, good for an NBA record. The Magic were completely hapless, even by […]
I met Andy and Ivan for dinner at the steakhouse next to the Garden before the penultimate home game on Friday night. The three of us split a porterhouse and a bottle of Chilean wine while kibitzing about which Knicks we actually wouldn’t mind seeing around next season (there aren’t many). I also learned, somewhere […]
Yesterday I started looking for a job. A part-time job, admittedly—something that can help me pay the bills at the end of the season—but a job nonetheless. I Googled legal temps and came up with about a dozen different staffing agencies, all of which seemed to feature on their website the same banner photo of […]
The Knicks better get back in the tomb quick. The win against Philadelphia on Easter Sunday leaves New York only one game worse than Minnesota and, with only five games left in the season, jeopardizes the Knicks’ chances at landing the top pick in the draft. These are the games that could haunt me if the […]
It normally takes four and a half hours to get to DC. It took almost eight on Friday. Traffic on the BQE, traffic in Staten Island, traffic on the Cars Only side of the southbound New Jersey Turnpike, traffic on the deck the Delaware Memorial Bridge, a few miles of light congestion through Delaware and northern […]
The Knicks lost last night. I’m tired of writing about that. They did their job, anyway, and maintained a two game lead on Minnesota for pole position in the Draft lottery with seven games to go. The book proposal is almost finished. I’ve been writing sample chapters—writing the book, as it were—to include with the […]
The weather has become an extension of the schedule. It was subfreezing in Chicago today, more bone-chilling than when I first visited in December. My winter coat didn’t do much good. I stuffed my hands into the pockets as I traversed windy Lake Street, my fingers still felt numb. Even the elements want me to […]