Leaving Rollingstone. Kevin Fenton
else watched TV downstairs.
I sat on the bed as if on a raft at sea while the Twins game unfolded. I dealt myself my baseball cards—the Twins and then their opponent. I stared at these talismans; I read the little paragraphs on their backs. If the game got too close and the excitement too much, I sometimes shut off the radio.
Or it was winter, same scene, but the windows were already glossy with darkness, reflecting my decorated walls, and I listened to the North Stars hockey game. The announcer narrated as quickly as he could, but he barely kept up with the action. How did the players move so quickly? Pass so deftly? Apparitions named Parise and Grant and Maniago and Goldsworthy performed acrobatics. I came to hockey as a blind man; I heard it before I saw it. I came to hockey as I come to a novel now; someone else’s words prompted my own pictures.
At such moments, with the transistor tubes glowing and the dark windows shining, my room felt like a tree house. If I could, I would have pulled up the ladder that connected this tree house to the world.
Dennis loved basketball. He once walked three miles down the wooded hill at the edge of our fields in a snowstorm to practice. And my parents attended every Holy Trinity game, both home and away, traveling skinny and treacherous roads in winter to little towns forty miles distant, the trees on the side of the road encroaching like monsters. The whole family attended every home game. Even as played by Class C farm boys, basketball still had all its essential charms—the texture of the game itself, as sweaty as a locker room and as bright as a stage; the echoing, agitated crowd; the trembling bleachers; the controversies of fouls; the recital-like isolation of free throws; the mathematical other-worldliness of a perfectly arced shot; the zephyrlike exhilaration of fast breaks. Dennis was gifted and gutty, often double-teamed, and we cheered for him and agonized with him and became indignant at bad calls, and the cheering really did seem an expression of love.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.