Delusions of Adequacy

I'm headed up the road tomorrow to Virginia. By Saturday night, I intend to be sitting on the sofa at my parents' house, watching TV.

That's about it.

I'll be in Virginia for about a week, then back probably late Sunday. Posting until then will be non-existent. Sorry for that. I know y'all miss this site like crack when I don't post stuff.

When I return, posts about:

* Sore losers
* Why chess is the greatest game ever invented (with the possible exception of basketball)
* The doctrine of sovereign grace and why everything you know about God may be wrong
* ... and, of course, The Night I Scared the Bus Driver!

Or maybe just more of the same ol' crud.

So till next week: take care of yourselves, my friends and family.

See you later.

Below I profess to hate Valentine's Day. And I do. It may have started off with the best of intentions, but it's evolved into a massive assault on the self-esteem and mental well-being of anyone not romantically involved with someone else.

So as an antidote to the consumerism of this holiday, and of the hatred I expressed earlier, here's a few words from the ultimate authority on love.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Of a parent for a child; of a child for a parent; of a man for his wife; of a brother for his brothers and sisters; of all types, but especially of Christ for His people, and however imperfectly, theirs for Him.

I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day. I hate this day.

Been a while since I wasted blogspace on things I find entertaining (other than basketball), so here goes a quick one.

Movies: Finally got time this weekend to see the remake of John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13. A very decent effort; not on par with the original, perhaps, in terms of emotional or cultural impact, but I'm hardly the one to judge because I haven't seen the original. (Pause while certain folks pick their jaws up off the floor.) I will say that the remake suffers the same flaw that so many modern action flicks do: they're intense, visceral, and visually arresting -- right up until the climactic moments, when the hero hunts the villain through a (pick one) forest/factory/office building/airport. The final confrontation itself was pretty good, but I think a number of shots could have been shaved off the chase without any loss; and it probably would have been more intense.

TV: The new Battlestar Galactica series is the only thing I watch regularly now, apart from Adult Swim. I tried to keep up with the new season of 24 until I realized that its immense suckage was going to flense me of the will to live. And this despite the presence of the altogether yummy Kim Raver as Jack's new love interest. Oh, well; BSG is enough.

I'd also like to go on the record as being foursquare against Adult Swim's much-hyped Tom Goes to the Mayor, fifteen minutes of pain that recur with alarming frequency. As in, the same fifteen minutes over and over and freakin' over again, because Cartoon Network apparently only ordered about three episodes and they've been airing them twice a week since November. Maybe I'm getting old, maybe I'm missing something, but the show just isn't... what's the word? ... tolerable. Cancel it, Adult Swim, or lose me forever.

PC Games: Finished up a season in franchise mode on Madden 2005; took my Pittsburgh Steelers through an undefeated regular season, a perfect playoffs, and an overwhelming Superbowl victory. And then I wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer. Ah, the NFL season, so mercifully shorter than the NBA's; I'm still only 27 games into my NBA Live 2005 franchise. That's 27 games out of 82, for this season only. After this season, I'll only have 24 seasons left. So let's do a little math: 82 games times 1 hour playing time for each game (I'm playing 12-minute quarters) times 25 seasons equals I will never finish this franchise before NBA Live 2006 comes out and/or I move on to ESPN's College Hoops 2k5. To do the latter, though, I'll have to buy an Xbox, and I'm just not ready for that yet.

(Yes, I could just simulate games; but then, how would I make sure Allen Iverson averages a triple double? The computer tends to shortchange your stats if you don't play each game, and if there's one thing I hate, it's watching my point guard's stats drop from 50 points/12 rebs/15 assists per game to something more realistic like 23/3/2. And it's absolute murder on Samuel Dalembert's blocking stat.)

Now, if May/June will just get here... I'm very much looking forward to GTA: San Andreas.

DVD: Got the first season of Miami Vice this week; I'd forgotten just how over-the-top it could be, as well as how gripping. The scene in the pilot where Crockett and Tubbs drive to meet Calderon, stopping off to see Crockett's ex on the way, all while Phil Collins' incomparable "In the Air Tonight" plays in the background... it's still as good today as it was 20 years ago. Which is to say, very good indeed.

Watched The Crow again last night for the first time in a long time. Amazing how little time has dimmed its power. It's one of those movies (like An American Tail) that always reduces me to helpless tears if I watch it alone. If they'd kept the scene from the comics where Eric takes leave of Sarah on the way to his final confrontation with the T-Bird, and he tells her something along the lines of "Sarah, I'm sorry for all the bad things that have happened to you, and all the bad things that are going to happen to you... Someday everything will be fair and there will be wonderful surprises. I truly believe this... " If that scene had made the movie, I'd probably still be sobbing like a girl.

Music: I haven't gotten into any new music lately; I think the last thing I bought was the White Stripes' concert DVD (amazing, by the way). Instead, I've turned to creating compilations from my existing collection, supplemented with occasional additions downloaded from RealPlayer. I have all the Erasure I'm ever going to need. Most-played compilation lately: a collection of tracks I've inaccurately titled "Industrial," which includes:

1. Megalomaniac (KMFDM)
2. Juke Joint Jezebel (KMFDM)
3. Beast (KMFDM)
4. Anarchy (KMFDM with Tim Skold)
5. mOBSCENE (Marilyn Manson)
6. Tainted Love (Marilyn Manson) (which I like better than the original)
7. Burning Inside (live) (Ministry)
8. Blackball (KMFDM) (my current favorite song)
9. Brute (KMFDM)

among others.

(Yes, I like these artists, to one degree or another, or at least these particular songs by these artists; and I also like hymns. Any other questions?)

Tried to download Explosions in the Sky's album Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place because I enjoyed their work on the Friday Night Lights soundtrack; they have a sort of Daniel Lanois meets Godspeed You Black Emperor sound that is lush and haunting if you go for that sort of thing, or perhaps just simply annoying if you don't. I like it; I just wish RealPlayer hadn't botched my download. Twice. Resulting in tracks that skip and miss out and buzz with radio-like static at apparently random intervals. Most distressing. The music's still good, though.

Suddenly, I'm very much wanting a pair of Reebok Pumps. That must mean it's bedtime! Goodnight.

Our 8th grade girls' basketball season ended today. I already miss it like a drug addict on forced withdrawal.

It ended with a bang. The NGMSAL tournament began last Tuesday, with our girls facing off against their in-county rivals, whom they'd already beaten twice in the regular season. Despite a shaky second quarter (when an assistant coach was told to send in the subs, she sent ALL of them at once, instead of one at a time, and a hefty lead was cut to ribbons within a few minutes of play), our girls won convincingly. On to the second round. A proud moment for the girls' coach, none of whose teams had ever made it so far before, regardless of talent or record.

Last night, our team faced off against North Whitfield, a team that had defeated us twice in the regular season -- though the second time shouldn't have happened. We were up by 3 with 6.8 seconds to go. I distinctly remember the principal standing a few feet away from me on the balcony overlooking the court saying "What can they do in 6.8 seconds?"

Bad question to ask.

Because 6.8 seconds is plenty of time to inbound, get up the court, and unload a three-pointer to send the game into overtime.

Revitalized by the shot -- and our players demoralized by it -- North Whitfield went on to win the game by six.

(Weird thing: that same night, the same thing happened to the Houston Rockets against the Sacramento Kings. The Rockets were up 103-100 with 4.7 to go; Sacramento inbounded to Chris Webber while Tracy McGrady, figuring Webber would pass to Mike Bibby, moved to guard Bibby. Leaving Webber open for the shot. Which he made. And the Kings won by six in OT. The weird part is that I knew it was going to happen. Or, rather, I sat there watching it, still depressed about our game, and thought "Wouldn't it be freaky if the same thing happened to the Rockets... " Color me freaked.)

So expectations and spirits were high going into the game. Coach believed NW was on a downhill slide which our girls might just be able to capitalize on to win a third-time-pays-for-all victory.

It just wasn't meant to be.

The first half was brutal. After scoring only a handful of points in the first quarter, our girls came back to life in the second and clawed back from a double-digit deficit to cut NW's lead to five. I dared to hope that a comeback was on; but again... well, maybe the less said, the better. The final result wasn't close.

What do you say to a kid after a game like that? You're desperately disappointed, not so much for your own sake as for theirs; and you hope your disappointment doesn't make them feel bad. By the same token, if they haven't played their hardest, some disappointment on their part is good; the only shame failure should hold is when you fail because you haven't done your best. It's instances like this that make me glad I'm not a coach or a parent myself; I can play good-cop, I can say Good game, I'm proud of you even when I'm not sure it's the most profitable thing (for the kids) to say. (In any case, the second part is always true, whether the first is or not.)

Remind me to post sometime about sore winners.

Losing Friday night's game (images temporarily here) meant an early Saturday, as the consolation game was played at 9:00 this morning. And from the moment I stepped into the gym, the vibe was totally different.

I arrived at about 8:05; the coach and a couple of the girls were already there, with their parents. Over the next twenty minutes, the rest trickled in; we colonized the bleachers directly behind the scorekeepers' table and I chatted with Brittney's mom and Cassie's dad while the girls took the floor to shoot. (Great people; I've had the distinct pleasure of getting to know several of our kids' parents. They've done uniformly great jobs of raising great kids, a task I don't envy them in this day and time.)

Gametime: our girls jump out to an early and hefty lead over the Opponent, whom they've played twice before. (Opponent's name is withheld for reasons that will become clear shortly; anyone concerned enough to find out who they are can do so easily enough; and remember that all opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone.) I wasn't at the game our girls played at Opponent, but it was horror stories from that game that convinced me to start going to all the girls' games, home or away; you never know when another friendly adult is going to come in handy. Today's game was apparently a repeat of their first meeting; unable to get anything going early, Opponent resorted to fouling, early and often. They put our girls in the bonus within the first quarter. Our free-throw percentage could have been better; we didn't fully capitalize on the opportunity; but we were still up by a sizeable margin going into half-time.

Second half: same song, different verse. Several runs that brought Opponent within ten points were crushed with mechanical efficiency. And as Opponent saw their hopes dwindling with each passing second, they began fouling again.

Fouling so fast and hard that it was hard to keep track of. Our girls were again in the bonus for a full quarter -- the fourth -- and two of Opponent's players fouled out (vs. one of ours, a guard who takes losing harder than anyone I've ever met). Players were colliding, falling, hitting the floor with alarming regularity, including a scary fall taken by one of our post-players; one of Opponent's players fell on top of her and rolled over her. Bad. Another instance: driving along the baseline, one of Opponent's players decides to screen herself with a flailing elbow to her defender's solar plexus. Repeat after me, class: You can't do that.

As their fouls (including a technical -- four free-throws plus possession, muwaha-ha-ha-ha-ha! -- mounted, Opponent's fans began accusing the refs of the most improbable combinations of parentage, origin, and unethical conduct. For those of us there in support of our girls, it was hard to resist the temptation to answer in kind.

So we didn't. Resist.

But there was -- for me, at least -- an element of fun to it. What can you say to people who yell out things like:

Is it a coincidence that (Opponent) hasn't been to the line this entire half?

No, it's not a coincidence; it's called you foulin'.

Or you could say what one of Opponent's other fans (or maybe the one who yelled the question to begin with, I can't quite recall) said: It's all about the money!

Odd, because their county's per capita income outstrips ours by about 30%. I guess we're working miracles of economic efficiency over here, if we have money to spare to bribe refs.

And then there was the comment from Opponent's coach to one of the refs, passed up into the crowd from one fan to another: You must be from Murray county.

Sometimes, all you can do is laugh. Derisively.

In The Karate Kid, Mr. Miyagi tells Daniel, "No such thing bad student, only bad teacher. Teacher say, student do." Considering what the fans and coach were doing and saying in full hearing of their kids, it's not really surprising that Opponent plays such a brutal game.

Fortunately, our girls play brutal, too. They just play brutal legally. Last night they fell apart; but today they were a buzzsaw, picking off passes, making tough shots, cleaning up the boards. Girls put points on the board today who'd barely done so at all this season; and it was a joy to watch how much fun they were having. (You can see how much, at least until March 12th, here.)

Or maybe I'm projecting; because I sure as shootin' was having fun. So much fun that for a while I even managed to forget it was the last time.

There's next season, of course; the freshman and JV teams next year will, I'm sure, be dominated by players from this team. But today was the last time this team was together, as a team, with these particular kids.

They had a rollercoaster season that's ended on a high note: third place in the NGMSAL tournament is quite an accomplishment. But the only award that really matters is the one each player receives in her own mind, when she knows whether she's played her best, if she's left it on the floor or if there's more she could have done. I hope all our girls are satisfied and have no regrets. I have none myself, except that it's over.

It's 1990. All this cold fall night we've been working hard on a joint Ed School project, Laura and Laurie and I, at Laurie's place in Lambeth. Near midnight we put the finishing touches on it and decide to call it a night. Laura asks me to walk her to her car on the U-Hall parking lot across the street. I do it, gladly and a little smugly, the big strong man escorting the woman through hostile territory. It isn't till nearly two years later I find out Laura had been attacked the year before. Her simple gesture of trust still touches me, to this day, in ways I can't quite express.

It's December, 1992. My first drama class at UVA is coming to a close, and after a performance of Chekhov's Three Sisters, we all go to one of the Pavilions on the Lawn for a Christmas party. There are a dozen-odd of us, and we've grown close in the course of the semester, which we've spent interpreting scripts, analyzing characters, and mounting scenes to be critiqued by each other and by our instructor, Dawn, a slight blonde MFA candidate who looks ten years younger than she is. Names in the class are not as numerous as students: there's Perry and Daniel and Tina and Tina and Steve and Steve and Steve and Robert and Heather, who's a no-show, probably because she's playing tonight for the Lady Cavs. After a dinner of calzone, cider is poured and Twister is played. The night blurs into early morning and I leave the warm house for a frigid walk across the grounds to my dorm, where other friends lie already asleep. I see the stars and think I'll never be this happy again. Thank God, I'm wrong.

It's 1982, and it's our last night in Mexico. The truck and the trailer are both loaded to bursting and we're still having to leave things behind. I don't care. Soon we'll be on the road for the United States. On the way out of the village, I'll try to etch every cobblestone and mud-brick wall and dim lightpost into memory; between towns, in the blackness of a Mexican highway at night, I'll annoy my parents with off-key renditions of Homer and Jethro songs. But all that's a couple of hours in the future. Now, the truck sits idling, yellow and orange running lights glinting on white metal, seeming as anxious to leave as I am. Maybe I wouldn't have been as ready to leave if someone had told me that all the promises my friends and I had made to keep in touch would be broken and that I'd never see some of them again in this life. But then again, maybe I would have.

1996. I'm being interrogated by a former FBI agent who thinks I had something to do with the theft of $5,000 worth of video cameras from the Wal-Mart where I work. I didn't have anything to do with it, but I could lose my job and be prosecuted anyway. This strikes me as singularly unfair. As she grills me, it also strikes me as practically inevitable. You were on when it happened. You didn't lock them up. It had to be you. Who was working with you?And I answer as calmly as I can, telling the truth: I don't know anything about it, I'm not working with anybody, no I didn't lock them up but nobody told me to. You're very articulate, Stephen, you know that? You're so articulate I think you're not really talking to me now. I think you knew what you were going to say when you came in. I think you've been thinking about your answers and I think you made up a story to cover yourself. Great; I'll be sent to jail because I can't help sounding like I've swallowed a thesaurus. In the end, though, she settles for forcing me to admit that my best friend might have done it. It's an admission that leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, but the devil of it is that she's right when she says I have no real way of knowing he wasn't involved. And for the rest of my life, every time I see him, I'll always wonder if he was.

It's 1985 and I'm in the Capitol Building on a class tour of Washington. The group leaves the Rotunda without me. I look around and see only Artie, fellow 8th-grader and a bundle of nervous energy and nervous tics. For the next hour or so, we try to rejoin our group, but manage to miss them (while they're looking for us) no less than three times. Finally, in despair and wondering whether we'll have enough money in our pockets to put ourselves up in a hotel for the night, we go outside. Artie chases a squirrel across a grass lot in full view of fifty or sixty assorted lobbyists and congressional staffers; I have to physically stop him from climbing a tree to get at it. I ask him what he thinks he's doing. We gotta eat, Tilson.

In 1986 I see Blade Runner for the first time. At the end, Rutger Hauer's android character Roy Batty confronts Harrison Ford's police-sanctioned killer, and with his artificially-shortened lifespan drawing to close, delivers a valediction and challenge and elegy on the fleetness of all life. He offers glimpses of the marvels and terrors he's seen, and concludes: All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. And he dies, his moments spent.

It's 1992 and I'm with my best friends in a darkened apartment in JPA. We've been telling ghost stories in celebration of upcoming Halloween; this is the first time I'll ever tell my Day of the Dead story in which a friend of mine and I go to an abandoned hut by Lake Patzcuaro and witness a ghostly reenactment of a double murder. But it's also the night Dave Robson tells his story of a man haunted by the loss of all he's known and loved, until he despairs of the permanency of anything; the story's central line, which still resonates across the years: Nothing is permanent; not even loss.

It's 1980. I'm watching people crawling across cobblestones on their knees. They kneel on the stones, hands clasped in prayer, and inch forward across broken glass. Blood stains the knees of their white robes. Fifty yards away, the door of the village's Catholic church -- in Mexico, a far more medieval institution than its American counterpart -- stands open, dark, and mute. I ask my dad why they're doing this, and he explains, but it isn't until years later that I understand how tempting it is to try to purchase for myself the forgiveness only Christ could afford, and which God offers for free.

It's December 2001. I'm in Charlottesville with Dave and Dave for a single day of company and reminiscence. We see a movie and have dinner (Dave Worrell putting down the biggest tip I've ever seen, and giving our waitress a story she's probably still telling) and shoot pool. And for a little while, ten years haven't passed. I take my leave of them near midnight, and I try not to say goodbye.

It's 1980 and I'm in a traffic jam in Mexico City. It takes three hours to move a single block. Hector, the doctor and family friend I'm spending the week with, and Irma, his girlfriend, keep up a steady stream of conversation, inlcuding me as if I were a grown-up. We go to a planetarium where they're staging a mostly-audio production of War of the Worlds. On the way home, we talk about whether life could develop in a methane environment, but all that night I'm haunted by the depiction of a world in ashes. In 1985, an earthquake strikes Mexico City, and we've never heard from Hector again, although I did once have a very vivid snippet of dream in which Hector stood wailing in grief outside Irma's demolished house.

It's 1995 and I'm visiting with my grandmother, whose ten-year battle with cancer is drawing to its inevitable end. The disease has left her a shell of what she was, and now there's nothing left but the husking breaths and the ticking of the nightstand clock. As I've done each day for the better part of a week, I stay by her for an hour and then, almost relieved, I prepare to go. For the first time this visit, she notices my presence and stirs, saying something.

Gotta go?

Yes, for now, but I'll see you later.

Goodbye.

I'll see you later.

No. Goodbye.

Although she hangs onto life for another week, it's the last time she speaks to me. But even if I'd known it at the time, I still would have said only what I did.

I'll see you later.

It's about 10:10pm and I'm watching the Cleveland Cavaliers clawing their way back from a 15-point deficit against the Miami Heat. It's now 77-74 and Cleveland has the ball... LeBron spins, shoots, is blocked, snatches the ball from mid-air and shoots again, and is blocked again... somehow the Cavs score anyway.

One of those nights. LeBron James has 28 points and 10 assists. He just recently turned 20. I just recently turned 34.

And an O'Neal dunk off a Wade rebound. Nip and tuck.

I like the Cavs. Not just because of James and not just because they share the name of my alma mater's team. I like them because they seem like a bunch of working guys, and their young floor leader comes off as a genuinely nice person. And I like them because of The Optimist, whose never-say-die attitude has ticked off even Cavaliers fans who blame him for firing up the opposition with his predictions of victory.

Ah, the Heat just went on a tear and are up by 7 again. Crap on a cracker.

It occurs to me that I have always been extraordinarily blessed by the people I know. Far more than I've blessed them. That's been the case as long as I can remember, and it continues to this day.

Remember in your prayers my friend Sergeant Todd Williams, who attends my church and whose unit left recently for Fort Stewart on the way to Iraq. His wife Meredith will deliver their first child in April. I last saw Todd at his family's annual Christmas party on December 18. As he was preparing to go home, we were saying goodbye and all I could get out was "If we don't..."

It was like running into a brick wall. He bailed me out with a grin:

Yeah, I hear you.

If you're reading this, Todd, stay safe, brother. I commend to you Romans 8.

Back on January 3, I wrote that this area was never going to seem like home to me, barring either miraculous or catastrophic circumstances. But recently... between the friendship of Todd and his brother John Paul, and the best students in the world, and the proximity of relatives (shout-out to the world's greatest little sister and everybody up at Covenant), and the welcoming congregation of my church (already family, now and forever), and my overdue realization of how good I have it here...

...maybe there's a miracle about to happen.

No miracle for the Cavs, though: they lost, 100-88.

Good night.

Today's fortune cookie:

"Somebody is glad that you're his/her friend."

I didn't realize I had any transgendered friends.

The invitation came as a surprise yesterday morning: one of the girls on the 8th grade basketball team had backed out of the team's trip to Knoxville to watch the Tennessee/Georgia game, and the coach wondered if I'd be interested in taking her place.

A little background. I've been coming to the girls' games this year because the 8th grade team is comprised almost exclusively of the best students who ever took my class, students I've taught all three of the years I've been here, surrogate kids for the children of my own that I don't have. They seemed genuinely pleased when I'd show up for their games; they asked me to come to their away games, which I did, and even to their practices, which I also did. When my birthday came last week, the entire team signed a birthday card to me, with a team photo. That card is now perhaps my most prized possession.

So yes, all things considered, I was very interested in going with them.

It entailed a two-hour drive to Knoxville, a two and a half-hour game tipping off at 7pm, and another two-hour drive home, on a school night. It meant being out of the house during a time I'm normally focused on resting and recuperating for the next day. But it also meant getting to spend time and make memories with my kids and their families.

So we left the school at about 3:30 and made our way up 411 and 129 North, through parts of Tennessee I'd never seen. I rode with the team's coach, two of the players, and one of the team moms. They talked; I listened.

At the arena, the team went down to the cafeteria to eat, while the rest of us went to find seats. I ended up a few rows above and behind anybody from our group, on the Tennessee end of the court, almost directly behind the goal. It was a good vantage point for watching the cheerleaders warm up... you get no idea, watching on television, how heart-stoppingly high those girls get thrown: they were parallel to the ground and as far up as the shot clock. Fourteen, fifteen feet, easily. A tense moment or two as a girl would go up and come back down off-vertical, arcing several feet to one side or the other and making the waiting team of male cheerleaders shuffle over to catch her. Turns out Tennessee's squad recently won second place in a national competition. I'd like to see what the first-place winners were capable of.

But there was no one around me that I knew. I scanned the crowd as it gathered for signs of people I knew. No joy. Until, with about ten minutes left till tip-off, I saw them: on the far side of the arena and on the upper deck. Miles away. But I wasn't going to sit with strangers while my kids were somewhere in the building, so I made the pilgrimage along with a student who'd been sitting a few rows down. We got there with five minutes left till tip-off and settled in.

Surprising things about basketball in big arenas: the court looks much smaller in real life than it does on TV, while the arena looks much bigger. And I'd forgotten the noise a crowd at a sporting event is able to produce.

The player intros for Tennessee were preceded by fireworks spouting from the goals; flashing, whirling spotlights; the signatures of the players spinning across the floor, projected in white light. Not really the sort of thing that impresses me anymore... until the 14 year-old girl in front of me, one of my best students from the first group I taught this year, leaned back and said "That's awesome! Can we get fireworks too, when they introduce us at our games?"

I don't see why not, unless Crazy Joe's sold out of sparklers.

At first, I had to keep reminding myself to watch the game on the floor instead of on the giant TV screens in the corners. Another interesting difference between TV basketball and live basketball: how much you miss, the off-ball play and the transition game after baskets. TV butchers these aspects of the game as often as not with close-ups of the ball handler and instant replay of made shots; these are entertaining, of course, but they disrupt the natural flow of play. Watching basketball on TV is a lot like watching movies on TV: they're both constantly interrupted with interjections that are occasionally informative but often useless.

Perhaps I'm too harsh -- those replays do have their place, when officials make calls on things impossible to see from the nosebleeds. And I wish I'd seen the replay of the moment when Tennessee guard Loree Moore got her nose broken going for a rebound. All we saw was that she went down and stayed down for what seemed an eternity while Tennessee coaches and medical personnel gathered around her. When she was taken off the floor in a wheelchair, I was momentarily afraid she'd suffered some sort of career-ending injury... but then I figured she would've been carried off on a stretcher if things were that bad. It wasn't until earlier today I found out what happened and the extent of the damage.

Our girls were fairly evenly split in their allegiances between the competing schools. We're in Georgia, but close enough to the line that Tennessee has a sizeable contingent of fans among us. On several occasions, my loyalties were called into question by one side or the other, or both at once, in conversations that went like this:

Mr. Tilson, are you cheering for Tennessee?

Well, yes; yes, I am.

I thought you were for Georgia.

Yes, I am.

What?

I don't really care, I just want a good game.

Oh, okay.

And it was a good game, nip and tuck, for the first half. Tennessee started pulling away in the second half and never looked back. And when Moore went down, it sealed the deal; Tennessee got mad and played with greater intensity than before. It was beautiful to watch, plenty of hustle and tremendous skill on display at both ends of the court, but it was clear there was no way Georgia was going to claw back.

(Tennessee's players weren't the only ones mad, of course; their fans were fit to be tied. A guy on the deck below us yelled fruitlessly at the refs the whole time Moore lay on the floor, accusing them of being everything but Christians and of allowing the game to get out of hand -- I remember thinking that if he'd wanted to see truly bad officiating, so bad as to be dangerous, he should've come to our game of the Tuesday before. His tirade prompted one of the girls to wonder if he was drunk, and to propose going down there to ask him if he was. Such are the workings of the teen-aged mind. I told her he'd just say No, I'm not drunk, you're the one that's drunk, and that satisfied her until the guy sat down and the whole thing was forgotten.)

Of course, I'd say I only spent about 60 or 70 percent of my time watching the game. The rest was taken up with monitoring the comings and goings of a dozen teens (none of them really my responsibility, technically, but you worry anyway, when they're your kids) and talking to them.

And roughhousing with them. Because foam Tennessee sticks were provided free to everyone entering the arena, and they made such formidable harmless weapons. I passed on them at first, until the boy who moved with me from the arena pit to the upper deck started hitting me with his, at which point I armed myself to retaliate. I did, and considered the whole thing settled; when we joined the rest of our group on the upper deck, I gave my stick to one of the girls and forgot about it until momentarily

WHAP

upside the head. And I looked and beheld the boy grinning at me from a couple of empty seats down. And I turned to the girl who had the stick.

Let me have that back for a minute.

Okay.

WHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAP

I believe in massive retaliation. Revenge overkill. The kid even stopped hitting me, at least until I gave the stick back to the girls.

If there was anybody in the world happier last night than me, I'd love to know how. There are some moments in life that transcend the simple and routine concepts of fun or enjoyment or pleasure to become something greater: moments of joy that have the power to sustain for years to come. They're moments that make you grateful to have been alive just for that moment; that cause you to thank God for letting you be here, right here, in this place, with these people, tonight. When darker, colder times come -- as they always do -- you pull that moment from its box in your memory and turn it over and over in your mind, and let its perfection refresh you and strengthen you to go on. I'll be turning to this one, I'm sure, for many years to come.

They'll be doing it again, and I hope to go with them, at the end of February. Whether the moment can happen again remains to be seen; such moments strongly resist replication. And even if it can happen again, the day will come when these kids will be gone from my life to their high school and college days and their lives beyond, and all I can hope for them is that they may someday be as happy as they've made me.