Revelation

In the wake of another Charvet wacky week filled with not only adversity, but random thoughts...I faced legal advocates; kids with backpacks of weed; truants, student anxiety/depression; tech-savvy Googlers cheating their way through online assessments; meetings, vice principals, colleagues’ paradigms to a point of classroom silence,  lack of support, funding, and facilities, yet a hug and a few high-fives, and an overwhelming sense of, “Why am I here?” Then, it happened...

“Donk!  Donk!”

I blink.  I am back to reality. All eyes are upon me while I give my motivational speech before class ends. I send the kids out the door on a positive note to contemplate my soliloquy of “sageness.”

I stand in front of more than forty students.  I am in charge. Not only in charge of managing a learning center, in charge of changing lives.

When did this happen?  When did I became an almost sixty-year old man in a green shirt giving information to at-risk youth? “Holy Snikeys!” the voice in my head shouts.

Then, it hits me; a memory from the past as if Dickens' ghost suddenly dropped by to pay me a visit. A haunting memory of a simple action -- just trying to make two free throw shots. My mind rushes back in time.

I finally got my chance to get into the game.  I had waited eagerly to just play the game. Well, we must have had a big lead for me to go in.  I got the call and enthusiastically raced on to the court although as cold as a day in San Francisco.  I immediately fought for the ball under the net and got fouled going back up.

I heard the crowd.  I saw my relatives all sitting in the upper middle section of the bleachers.  I went to the line. I bounced the ball a couple of times. I took the first of two shots.

“Donk!”

It hit the rim and dropped to the floor with a thud.

Frustrated I thought, “Well, that was for shit.”

The crowd cheered me on despite being a “splinter collector” off the bench.

I was frustrated, but my arms reacted like limp, heavy noodles that seemed to flex erratically on their own; my wrists were rusty hinges.

I concentrated.  I put up my shot -- another “shitty shot.”

“Donk!”

“Damn!”  I missed both free throws. I really wanted to make those shots; I had a chance to prove I was “a player.”  Later, after the game, the assistant coach ( a great guy) said to me.

“I believe if you would have made those shots you would have brought the house down.”

The best words a bench-warmer could ever hear.  And, to this day, missing those two shots seems to creep into my mind now and again.  Ironically, now, shooting a free throw, for me, is as easy as slicing warm butter. I can make twenty free throws in a row run to the other end of the court and make another twenty.  

Often, for whatever reason, I contemplate on those two missed shots: Did it make me driven and to have a life’s purpose?; to study and practice; rinse and repeat?  If I had made those shots, would my life have been altered? Would I have never helped thousands of kids find their life’s purpose? Would I have been put on a different space-time continuum, never got an art degree, met my wife, become a teacher and so forth and so on? Actually, at times, it haunts me.

Presently, and it might be my age, but these life experiences are all starting to make sense.  Well, as much as making sense of reflections can make. And then I think, “What I can tell my young, lost students to make of their lives?  Their thoughts? Their conundrums and so forth and so on?” The reflection process is perplexing, but life does move on and we just have to have faith it points us in the right direction.  I guess, sometimes when you miss, life has other ways for one to make it. ###