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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here.
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Cosmic Brownie, Zone Bar
Matthew Morris
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My high school tennis teammates and I have never forgotten the bus rides: we’d be on the road from Yorktown, home of the Patriots and just around the corner from the house where my folks raised me, to some other school in the Northern Virginia suburbs, Wakefield or (J.E.B.) Stuart, Edison or Mount Vernon. Some of us would be playing (at minimum talking about) Pokémon or Yu-gi-oh!, and my oldest friend, Justin, would shake his head at our nerdiness, and sometimes, Ben Martindale would (or did this only happen on the basketball bus, a cooler set?) begin to beatbox, Aidan (who later lost his eligibility, though he was our most talented player, light on his feet, consistent in his ball-striking) maybe rapping along. At one point or another as we neared our destination, Coach Barton, who’s also just Coach to us now, would break out a box of Zone Bars, an energy bar that tasted almost as good as a Snickers if your head was in the right place, and start chucking the singly wrapped protein pick-me-ups into the seats behind him—to his players, his team. Or that’s how I want to remember the Zone Bars making their way to us.
Coach had an old-fashioned tennis game, the flattest of flat strokes, ball skidding low off the court, some underspin but never top-, and taught at a university in D.C., but we knew (or thought we did) he’d once been in the intelligence community. He combed over his white hair to cover the top of his head and was still very fit in his mid-to-late sixties, hitting every day of the week with the teenagers who were his after-school charges. During our matches, Coach would waltz the perimeter of the Bluemont Park courts, watching us serve and return and make and miss through the fencing. At practice, he never drilled us or put us on the white lines to run, instead produced his hoppers of balls and told us to hit, and hit we did, among ourselves and with him, every afternoon of the school week and on Saturday mornings, too, as joggers and dogwalkers took the trails beside the courts and others drove into the old-folks’ community above the park.
Coach died today, or at any rate I learned of his death today, just past his eightieth and six years after he’d suffered a heart attack or a stroke, or maybe both. I remember visiting him at his home with two of my closest friends during his convalescence, all of us in Arlington during Christmastime, the days before the day itself. (Advent, the church a good walk away from where I live now, in Missouri, a college town, still a student, a more devoted student of tennis than ever I was then, is a season of peace.) We stayed for perhaps an hour, catching up, my friend John, whom I tried to call earlier, at lunch, and who played the sport in college, talking about hitting with him at the local YMCA, whose longtime owner, Mel Labat, had recently passed. (Coach Labat drove a Bentley, red, and had once taken Yorktown into the upper reaches of the D.C.-area basketball scene, and he had Parkinson’s the whole time I knew him, but I didn’t know what the disease was, then, just knew that his hands shook when he talked to you, which disconcerted teenaged me.) This was the same house where Coach would have us over to celebrate the end of each high school tennis season, where we would play ping pong and once, if I remember accurately, played basketball. The house where I told Coach, at the end of my last season on the team, the end of the last high school tennis season for most of my buddies, that I would miss all this, would miss it very much. He said that the memories would be good ones, that I would have them in the years ahead, that this would be a gift (he did not use this word): the pleasure of recollection.
I know that to recollect is not in every instance healthy, that sometimes the past must be put away in order to proceed forward in one’s life, to not become frozen or stuck in a room where you no longer live (that’s what a tennis friend in Arizona, one of my best friends in Arizona, once said to me, the language he used: the room). And I know that memory can be painful, because there are memories that pain me, songs I have tried not to listen to for their associations. But I know, too, that what Coach said has proven true. John (who’s a poet) and I have camped at the Grand Canyon, where my mother’s mother wants her ashes spread, because there she met my mother’s father, had the most joyful years of her life, even if he later left her, in each of the last four years. We hike down into the red rock during the day, always ascending faster than we’ve descended. Before we start back up toward the rim, we each take out a Little Debbie’s Cosmic Brownie, white sugar straight to our veins. On occasion, to really hype ourselves up, we’ve been known to yell into the sacred space of the canyon, Yu-gi-oh! In the night, we talk about tennis and trading card games and Pokémon and our parents and writing and love, or we sit around the fire and watch the wood crumble to ash, an otherworldly confluence of stars above. We remember so much, play the old hits, tell the same stories, cover the same ground; we only see each other, after all, once or twice a year, especially now that my folks’ve left Arlington. The remembering is the ritual that makes us cognizant of the gift of our lives, lives lived in parallel.
Coach told me, after my last high school singles match, that he loved the way I’d played that afternoon, attacking the net, moving forward again and again. I can only imagine him playing that way during his college days (he played Division 1 like my folks, at Dartmouth) and know that he would’ve smoked me. Another friend who never played tennis but came to our matches and so was made an unofficial member of the team took a photo of Coach years ago while he, my friend, was watching C-Span to kill time. He didn’t expect to see Coach there, on the TV, talking about a foreign policy predicament. He showed me the photo a few months ago (I can’t remember why), and I said, I’m going to text this to myself. I did. We, my friend (who later became my four-years’ college roommate) and I, have the easiness of brothers and can bicker, our other friends’ve said, like an old married couple. I remember sitting on the balcony of an Airbnb in San Diego with him late into night during another friend’s bachelor weekend, getting very cold but not wanting to go inside, not wanting the moment to become a memory, for it to end.
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Matthew Morris is the author of The Tilling, an essay collection exploring questions of race, identity, family history, and love. He is a Ph.D. student in the creative writing program at the University of Missouri – Columbia and holds an MFA from the University of Arizona.
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