Soundbytes 2.12.26
Before We Fall
MY OLD MAN AND I ONCE PLAYED PIG to a draw, stalled after a half hour at P.
A few summers before, my old man had nailed a basketball hoop to the garage. In that way, when I was dawdling in my room on nice summer days pretending to be e. e. cummings by pecking out random words on my old Smith Corona, my mother could shoo me out of the house to shoot baskets. (My typing may have been a little hard to listen to. After each letter I had to pause and search out the next, then pry the jammed letters apart.)
Faced with the prospect of either trimming the boxwood or cleaning out the gutters, my old man laced up the black hightop gym shoes he used for wading in creeks to seine for crawdads, stripped off his shirt down to a wife-beater, and challenged me to a game of PIG.
A reputed former athlete who once chucked the javelin for Stivers High School, he now windmilled his arms in the prescribed fashion to limber up, ran briefly in place, then leaned against the garage for a minute, either to stretch his leg muscles or to keep from falling down, dizzy.
First, he thought I should learn how to confound my opponent by dribbling behind my back, and he attempted to demonstrate, but my brother’s basketball had a leak and refused to bounce. So we took a break to locate the bicycle pump, which turned out to lack the needle accessory needed to inflate the ball. Instead he topped off the tires of all the bicycles in the garage, and finally drove a nail into the wall where he hung the pump. I could see him looking around hopefully for other tools to hang, but my mother yelled from the kitchen window, asking how her two big-time athletes were doing. He sighed and picked up the basketball.
In the game of PIG, one player executes a difficult shot—maybe a sweeping hook shot or an eyes-closed behind-the-back shot or a long-distance shot from behind the hedge halfway down the driveway and banked off the neighbor’s awning—and the other player has to mimic it. Failure to repeat the shot earns the shooter a letter. First to spell out Pig, loses.
I started with a two-handed underhand lob from between my legs, but missed, bouncing off the rim. My old man demonstrated his much-touted specialty, a leaping hook shot, but missed everything— rim, backboard, and garage. I attempted a shot I had seen at recess, slamming the ball down so hard it would bounce up to the basket, but the ball just landed with a soggy splat and rolled into the roses. Next turn, my old man paced off the regulation 15 feet to an imaginary foul line, and we took turns missing. Finally he stood on tip toes directly under the basket and nudged the ball over the rim. I tried the same shot and missed. P! he yelled. With no real hope of success, I heaved the ball over my shoulder, facing away from the basket, and the ball swooshed cleanly through the rim. He tried the same and threw the ball onto the garage roof. P! I yelled.
Tie score. And that’s where we left it. It turned out that the ivy on the chimney needed my old man’s attention, and I had a side yard that needed mowing with our old push mower, more of a workout than any ten afternoons of trick shots. So, with some relief we got to our chores.
At supper, my mother wanted to know who had won, and my old man said he had taken it easy on the kid. Before I could object he immediately launched into mumbling his usual mealtime prayer, so we all looked down at our laps and moved our lips along with him.
So, does the song below, Before We Fall, have anything to do with the text above? Nothing at all. Except that for my 2¢ the song says all I wanted it to say and needs no particular preface, and ditto for the text.
And since the song and the text are unrelated, I tossed in a random photo I like, for the same price. The charmer on the right is my brother.
Before We Fall (clicks to play)
Neon blue, we'll stop awhile tonight After miles of Jesus radio Where's the harm in warming for the night Pilgrims in a storm, and miles to go No room service after ten, no long distance calls at all Now we might tell a lie or two Before we fall There’s a tomcat on the landing, he could use a tail Though he cannot hold a tune Someone’s working up fried onions, by the smell of it Down the hallway in a hotplate room And I only know this one old prayer by heart, that’s all I might say it anyway Before we fall Snow makes the city quiet this late Till the plows come around I can't sleep 'cause you're calling in your dreams And that’s one sad little sound Can’t help wondering what you dream about, do you dream of us at all? Guess we tell a lie or two Before we fall No room service after ten, this black and white tv don't work at all And we might tell a lie or two Before we fall
Philip Singer’s first chapbook, Natives (Chowder Press, Madison, WI) was followed by See Rock City (Gallimaufry Press, Bethesda, MD), poems first published in North American Review, Poetry Magazine, Swanee Review, Yale Review, Southern Poetry Review and other publications too obscure for even the author to remember. He also co-edited the regrettably short-lived New River Review (Radford, Virginia), with poet Charles L. Hayes, and Poetryfish (Norwich, Vermont), an online journal of poetry and fiction. Sun Tea, a serialized memoir first published here on Substack, appeared in 2022, with a couple of afterwords (Hey, kids, wait up!) in the years since.
Singer lives in Virginia with his wife Briah and their little gray wonder-dog, Maisie.
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