Swish

A long time ago, when I was quite a different person, well before I was anything like any of you know now. Before I became a professional anything, when I still had short hair that was in the slightly ragged stage where it was trying to be long while still being short, when I was still under (likely well under) 5 feet tall, and the only thing I was remotely aggressive about or proud of was my voice. A long time ago, I was good at something else.

I was good at basketball.

Really good at it.

Shocker isn’t it? I can hear jaws hitting floors from here. Me who hates sports, who won’t sit still for more than five minutes of a hockey game and who considers being forced to sit through any kind of playoff a form of punishment…

But I was. I was so good at it, that my parents bought me a basketball hoop that year, and installed it on our garage roof. It was too low to be professional height, but I was so short that such things didn’t really matter. For a long – yet painfully short- period of time, I would challenge my dad to basketball games, where the salt breeze would pull at my curls and dry the sweat off my skin almost as soon as it appeared. I’m sure that in those days, my dad let me win.

I was never on the team or any such thing; I was too busy with choir and dance classes and eventually play rehearsals. But still…

The only time I was ever picked first for a gym team in high school, the only time I was ever not left standing against the wall, was when we were playing basketball. The running joke used to be that I was good at it because I was so small I could dodge through other players’ legs, and it’s true, I could dash through spaces most of my taller comrades couldn’t manage.

Needless to say, my life took me on a much different path, and it’s been a very long time since I set foot on a court, but the life I lead right now presents odd temptations and odd opportunities.

There’s a thing on cruise ships called In Port Manning, commonly abbreviated to IPM. What it boils down to is if you’re on IPM duty in any given port, you have to stay on board so that, in case of an emergency; there will be enough of a skeleton crew to fulfill emergency procedures. What it means for those of us in my department, is that if you’re on IPM duty, you run from the time you get up to the time you collapse into bed in the mid-evening. Today was my day.

One of my activities requires me to be on the sports deck, and I was running early. The basketball court is never empty, as its one of the most popular PAX activities, but today we’re in Israel, and three quarters of the population of the ship is out exploring the Holy Land, the court was empty, and even my light, mary-jane’d footsteps seemed to echo somewhat as I crossed it, and the basketballs themselves were out – a rarity, as we’ve had a lot of problems with them getting stolen.

Thump, thump, **rattle**

Rim shot…rebound

Thump, thump, **rattle**

Rim shot…rebound

And then something somehow magical happened. I found the sweet spot on the backboard…

Thump, *swish*

Thump, *swish*

Swish…

Swish…

Swish….

Swish…

And for the next 15 minutes, I was a kid again, and there was just me and the court and the whipping sound of pure net, and the sound of the ball echoing through the perpetual Israeli half-light.

Once upon a time…before I ran away to join the circus, before I came to ships, before I became me…I was someone else.

When life sets us on a path we’re happy with, we seldom have occasion to look back at what we were before our steps turned in a certain direction. But sometimes, just for one shiney shiney…it’s good to look back.