This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

by Alan Lew

I was sitting in my living room alone one Saturday afternoon, when I heard the sound of a basketball bouncing on the sidewalk outside. Before I knew it, big, wet tears started rolling down my cheeks. The sound of the ball took me back to when I used to shoot hoops with my father, now dead fourteen years. We played on the little asphalt court he built for me down the hill from our house. I was an American kid. I lived for sports. I was captain of my high school football team, and I had all the moves in basketball. I could dribble behind my back. I could shoot the J. But my father was born in Poland to a family of war refugees, and when he came to America at the age of nine, he spent every afternoon of his young life working to help support his family. So my father couldn’t shoot the J; my father didn’t have any moves. My father would fling the ball wildly toward the basket like a shot-putter gone berserk. When he tried to dribble, the ball would go bounding off in every direction. Now you should know that my father had an ego as big as all New York; he never admitted he was wrong, and he competed fiercely at everything he did. He defended his position in the silliest argument as if his life depended on it. Yet he regularly humiliated himself by coming down to this asphalt court to shoot baskets with me, laughing at his own ineptitude, cackling with self-deprecation as the ball flew out of his hands as if it had a will of its own. I never realized it then, but it seems obvio...