Detritus of the every days
Spending the end of summer in California and seeing the end of Ime Udoka's season before it started.
A big California house quiet at dawn.
Walking into the cool of a dark kitchen, powder blue light rising in the long windows and cast along the wide wood beams of the walls and ceiling, artifacts of decades worth of someone you love’s life neatly put away in the cabinets around you. A small stack of mail, a giant bowl of lemons, photographs on the fridge, detritus of the every days that made them, formed them, hurt them and held them. On the big daily calendar stuck to the side of the fridge, both your names written in pen, a firm line extending underneath. A loaded, near holy stillness.
What’s the proper term for a tenderness that wrecks you? Yours only to behold and only once. You only get so many firsts like this, every new detail arranging itself in memory where you can feel it reforming, sticking, making this room up for you somewhere deep in your brain. Upstairs, floorboards shift; outside, light pooling on the deep, dense green of ivy coating a stone wall pocked with mosaic tiles, a lemon tree, fallen leaves curling brown in the yard. I set a ceramic mug of tap water and my palm down on the dark stone countertop, listen, feel my heart ruffle and stir like the dusky mourning doves on the lines I can see a yard over.
Pulling into quiet streets, early. Sun slanting low over the hood and catching the smoke curling languid from Joey’s Camel up and out until it’s sucked through the open window. His wrist resting loose on the wheel, eyes tired. Warmth of him sunk low in the seat and thrumming like a magnet.
This angle, very familiar. This angle, static, safe, even though if I’m seeing it it means we’re driving, flying over the empty Golden Gate Bridge with the water disappeared underneath in the dark, cranking the car in tight zags down Lombard Street at night, taking the long curl of the San Mateo bridge with the water flashing silver in the sun coming up, city drifting way out and suspended in the fog.
For how bad I am at taking pictures of my friends, my eyes always clip the exact moment for my brain to collage that, if I knew how to take my phone and lift it up to catch without shifting in a second the awareness from happening to happened, I would. For how the glimpses come to haunt me as something I’ll wind up losing, that my memory will eventually clutter and misplace, I would.
Walking with Rob in the evening streets, getting turned around not paying attention to their names and how we ought to be ordering them. How I found him as I heaved the heavy front door of the old Italianate apartment building open to squint into the sun, tall and smiling and right there on the sidewalk. I barrel hug him, a little feral, around his torso.
Once, his voice gives his worry away when he says, “Seriously”, and motions for me to walk right beside him in the bike lane in a dark, narrow section of sidewalk behind a Safeway. Otherwise, his lightness is something that tumbles. Conversation going with it. One thing rolling into the next, like glimpsing your favourite clothes flowing warm and endless together in the dryer, everything blurring together.
We see the day out on the west side of Alamo Square, chasing the sun to different stretches of unoccupied lawn for the sake of me in shorts. The light’s so good and gold and shifting that we get hung up on whether or not there’s a word for the way light can travel like a physical thing, go from ephemeral to bracing, hang from the dogwoods and Monterey cypress and one stubborn willow like garland, in a beat.
It’s the last day of summer and there’s a sweet greenness to this. It’s the last day of summer and something about sitting, then walking it out, and later, watching moths flit fast as bats in the spotlights around the top of Coit Tower while I wonder if I can see my breath, feel the brace of the Pacific and realize what a lucky, full and generous, startling for how it all hits at once, tender and scorching summer it’s been.
It does strike me, several times, that I am having some of the warmest, trusting, collaborative, open-hearted conversations and days of my career as the parent, organizational body all these people and their stories support and spin out from seems to grow more callous by the day.
The business of being a woman in basketball, the tolls and tricks of it, are never so far off. There’s the private turned overt, exemplified often but bizarrely and most recently in Ime Udoka’s suspension and its spectrum of suspicion — from theorizing a relationship between strangers, NBA newsbreakers opting to turn into amateur TMZ reporters (to TMZ’s credit, they tend to get the details right); to some Boston fans doxxing every woman with a Celtics staff affiliation in a gross sleuthing exercise of absolutely no consequence — to overt acts of overriding a woman’s authority within the space of the sport, even while she’s working to shape the sport.
For me, as recently as this last trip which marked a proud, private box-ticking-off for me, that looked as innocuous as someone hijacking a conversation I was having with an athlete, an agent, a team-sided employee and driving it off the road I just spent the last however many minutes navigating with care and precision. It’s also looked worse — but those are conversations I tend to only trust to other women, and in private, because there’s a shorthand to how we talk about it, and things only develop a shorthand when they’re happening so often, and in the same ways, that they can be reduced to abstracts outside context. The best male friends I’ve made in this industry will listen, their faces open and patient, to these kinds of stories too, but there is never that flicker of recognition that comes so quick and so heartbreaking behind other women’s eyes, and often right off the top, based on the tone and first words we start these stories with. You don’t have to set much up. There’s no questions about who was there, when things happened, what else was going on at the time. They already know where it’s going because they’ve been there, probably more than once.
With Udoka, as it unfolded over my last 24 hours in San Francisco and then in transit home to Toronto, I felt surprisingly heartened by Brad Stevens saying it was “rampant bullshit”, what the women who worked for his organization had to put up with over the same period of time. Heartened at the frankness, but also annoyed at the handoff. That it takes a prominent man in the position Stevens is in to name what everyone already knew, already felt if they had a smidge of sense. That handoff of authority is always a little bit invisible. It stirs at the base of my neck, rankles along my shoulders, some latent instinct, like an animal’s hackles going up. The best I can describe it is as an unsettled feeling, where I find my eyes preemptively narrowing in suspicion — of what was said, by who, and why. Of motive. At some point it must have been a signal to pay close attention because the rules to survival were about to change. In some ways it still is.
Martin and I smoking in North Beach, the spitting rain lighting up the hood of a little cherry red pickup in watercolour neons of bar signs and the candlelight spilling out of the red sauce place behind us, my hands hovering close to it like I’m looking for the vibrations of the city still warm under the fender. Martin and I slipping in and out of bars, falling into flowering hedges (me), feeling the weight of the day’s work and all its wound tight lead-up unravelling in the hands of strangers teaching us new dice games on the bar countertop, patiently explaining the rules but leaving enough out that when we get it wrong they only seem sheepish, more endearing, bashful in how many they’ve put back, how these rules are reflex. Cresting hill after hill with loose pizza slices in hand, turning around in empty streets to check on the shimmering Bay Bridge behind us. How many times we crossed it in the days before and the days after I run out of fingers to count, but moving with new intention every time through a frenetic itinerary that looked impossible on paper, seems natural in real life. Two cities, 400-plus miles, soft shoulders of the Diablo Range shrugging around us in blankets of gold grass with far-off copses of California oak in Rorschach clumps, highway loose and winding with the rain dogging us every place we went and momentum, the kind I hadn’t felt in a long time, as a backseat driver happily breathing down our necks.
There’s looking forward and there’s realizing when you’re right there in the middle of something. Brain snagging on the way I’m getting a question out, heart snagging on the way a person is answering it, breath caught at the live green smell of every place after rain, or a rainbow coming out over Sacramento’s low skyline, or getting to watch people so at home in their skill palm and bounce a basketball across an empty court or wide, carpeted floor so the noise muffles and thunks up everybody’s legs, then spin the ball on the tip of a finger, laughing, barely looking.
Looking forward, across the roof of the car pulled off at Lime Point, Golden Gate rearing up in the dark, across intimate little dinner tables tucked away in corners so we can’t see and wouldn’t notice when the restaurant cleared out. Looking forward, over the wide, live sprawl of the Bay, the vistas of a city made for light that trickles, snags and slinks, to the all work that inevitably comes after this, reforming the hours of honest talk granted to me into small beats of a life, and trusting I can do it.