Working out

Kids--boys, girls last week, I guess--have been squeezing into the gym every day and night, each outfitted in t-shirt and baggy shorts, some kind of backpack strapped over skinny shoulders. It's basketball camp time for middle-schoolers, a whole week in the gym.

The first time I ever played golf I was probably fourteen. My uncle took me. But I'd been swinging golf clubs for years already, going across the street to a school playground and whacking smiley Acushnets with cast-off wooden clubs a neighbor had left out front with his junk one morning. Those clubs were a treasure.

I was in sixth grade, maybe fifth, when, once a week, we actually got to play in a gym, a grade school cracker box that was absolutely nothing more than a playing floor but felt like Madison Square Garden. I'd been playing basketball for years, shooting hoops on the schoolyard just across the street or right there at the bucket on my own driveway. The gym was pure gravy.

I started playing pee-wee baseball when I was a little boy, going off to other towns in the county and squaring off against their kids. I remember little else from that time in my life--that's how important pee-wees were; but I didn't learn to field grounders or shag flies in pee-wee leagues. I'd been doing all that with neighborhood kids for years, playing ball games that we invented once we knew how many of us had showed up at the sandlot diamond. Playing ball was my life as a kid. 

Basketball camps didn't exist back then, so I never trooped off like the army of boys all over the campus right now. But yesterday, when I was working out, a roar blew off the courts not far away. Kids were swarming around some little boy, and I knew in an instant the ingredients of the brew. Some kid threw something in right at the buzzer, a hail mary maybe that hit nothing but net. You just know those things.

It's a tough time at the college down the road. Lower enrollments have the institution in a squeeze. Last week in church, a faculty member asked for prayers for those who were getting and giving pink slips. She didn't need to say there will be tears. Cutbacks draw blood and sometimes spite. I've lived through them.

Meanwhile the college gym is full of wide-eyed kids learning about buckets. It's a PR thing, bringing all those kids on campus and wowing them, putting them through the cafeteria line, letting them eat as much ice cream as they want, bunking them up with each other. "You like it here? Isn't it fun?" Nobody needs to ask the question.

And the kids are thrilled to be there, even though there is no sandlot ball anymore and hardly anyone shoots buckets in a schoolyard. About the only place kids learn are venues run by adults. An old man like me can't help but think that's sad.

But it's life in the here and now, especially in small-town America. At the college where I taught for most of my life, faculty positions were cut while the institution forked over the cash for a football program that doesn't run on peanuts. Just down the road, a sprawling new PE facility is going up this summer at the very same time some of its profs are getting the news that they'll be saying goodbye. The millions of dollars going into that athletic facility. . .well, you know.

But then, as every kid in the gym on campus knows, in their local newspapers, no matter which burg they come from, high school sports get vastly more column inches than anything else--half the newspaper. It's what the public wants and where the money is. 

I played basketball until I was thirty, baseball--softball--until I was 55. I still work out, walk daily. I feel guilty--I don't feel like I can rest--until I sweat. And I know what it's like to hit a buzzer beater the way some kid did yesterday. I'm sure he told his parents when they called to find out how his day went at basketball camp.

I know that glory.

But I also know the woman in church who asked for prayer last Sunday. I recognize the weariness in her voice. 

I know that sadness too.