by Brett Steelman ('14)
I was nine and on a blacktop. School hadn’t started yet at Northwood Elementary. On the side of the basketball court, straddling the freshly-painted white sideline, I watched my classmates dunk on the lowered basketball hoops. Some made it, some didn’t. Those who made their dunk hung from the rim. Suspended. Not even the tips of their blue knock-off Jordan’s from Payless touched the ground. I thought it was ungodly.
The night prior the first frost settled on the surfaces of Ames, Iowa. It was a bit early, and “unexpected,” my mom told me. On every tip of grass was a silver freckle of ice. It was like looking over the top of a field of old people. Branches of trees were lined with frost, too, and their leaves. Silver linings. Regularly the backboards of the basketball hoops on the playground were see-through. Clear. But that morning they weren’t. Wings of frost stretched across their glass. I couldn’t see through to the other side.
So it was chilly, wasn’t forty degrees yet, and of course no elementary schooler dresses suitably for cool weather—besides, we all thought it was going to warm up anyway. The bell hadn’t sounded yet for school to start. At 8:05 a.m. the bell would go off. At 8:03 a sixth-grader ran from where his mom dropped him off in their tan minivan and announced to the playground a terrorist attack happened in New York: I stood over the sideline, my classmates were suspended from rims, lines of frost stretched across the court, and we all were underdressed. Unprepared. No kid stopped playing. No kid knew what terror was.
I was nine and on a blacktop. School hadn’t started yet at Northwood Elementary. On the side of the basketball court, straddling the freshly-painted white sideline, I watched my classmates dunk on the lowered basketball hoops. Some made it, some didn’t. Those who made their dunk hung from the rim. Suspended. Not even the tips of their blue knock-off Jordan’s from Payless touched the ground. I thought it was ungodly.
The night prior the first frost settled on the surfaces of Ames, Iowa. It was a bit early, and “unexpected,” my mom told me. On every tip of grass was a silver freckle of ice. It was like looking over the top of a field of old people. Branches of trees were lined with frost, too, and their leaves. Silver linings. Regularly the backboards of the basketball hoops on the playground were see-through. Clear. But that morning they weren’t. Wings of frost stretched across their glass. I couldn’t see through to the other side.
So it was chilly, wasn’t forty degrees yet, and of course no elementary schooler dresses suitably for cool weather—besides, we all thought it was going to warm up anyway. The bell hadn’t sounded yet for school to start. At 8:05 a.m. the bell would go off. At 8:03 a sixth-grader ran from where his mom dropped him off in their tan minivan and announced to the playground a terrorist attack happened in New York: I stood over the sideline, my classmates were suspended from rims, lines of frost stretched across the court, and we all were underdressed. Unprepared. No kid stopped playing. No kid knew what terror was.