In my fading memory, I remember your loping gait and the way you played football, which, like me, was not too well. We were strong and supple at 16, unlike many of our teammates, whose strength was more squat and stump-like. You and I were reeds bending in the wind, brimming with hopes and dreams. Decades later, my most vivid memory of you is of a cold cataclysmic Friday night on a football field when hopes, dreams and bone were shattered.
In the midst of our usual 3-6 season, in the fourth quarter of a game that had been decided in the first half, we trotted onto the field to occupy time and space until the final seconds seeped off the scoreboard and into the turf. That the other team was still playing its starters and trying to score again only added a sense of urgency to our excitement. In the cold rain we huddled, as much for warmth as by custom, as our leader barked out the defense, “Slant left-blitz-zone 32.” His warm words hung in the cold air like the dialogue in a cartoon. As a safety, you lined up on the strong-side hash marks opposite me, some twenty yards away.
In a matter of seconds, it was over. The quarterback’s quick toss to the tight end running a crossing pattern behind the blitzing linebackers. The cornerback’s futile attempt to tackle the ball-carrier from behind. Your collision with the runner as he crossed the goal line, his legs pile-driving into the soft, soggy grass.
I am not sure how much time passed before anyone realized that something was wrong, or how long you lay on the ground, or how you were maneuvered into the ambulance. In some dusty archive there is a reel of film that would answer those questions. What I have concluded is that the purpose of questions like that is to help make sense of something that is senseless, to try to bring order to chaos. What those questions help us to forget is the stark truth that sometimes, without logic or warning, life ceases to exist as we knew it. Those questions help us forget that in God’s warrantee there is fine print that we dare not read. All I know for certain, for certain, is that the ambulance silently slipped off into the rainy darkness, the red lights flashing and splashing in a thousand reflections the end of our youth.
I last saw you at our first class reunion. Ten years had atrophied your body into a wasteland. I thought of Prometheus who, in Greek mythology, was chained to a mountain in punishment. Unlike Prometheus, for you there would be no Hercules to unfetter the chains that bound you to that wheelchair.
As I leaned down to whisper in your ear, I was interrupted by someone with a camera. “Smile!” she said, and I instinctively did. In my blindness from the flash, someone took my place next to you, and I wandered thankfully into the crowd. What was I going to say? What could be said? That we were once reeds, bending gracefully in the breeze, full of hopes and dreams?
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