The Sun On the Backboard

 The house I grew up in had a detached garage in the back yard. In my memory, that old garage had a lean to it, with a cracked old concrete driveway leading from the street, between the house and the fence, to the front of the garage. 

I remember my dad and my brother Art having one-on-one basketball games there. I couldn’t have been older than three or four in those days. My brother Arturo was nine years older than I was, in my eyes a man. I remember dad’s thick black hair and white shirt keeping up with my brother, age not being notable, either old or young. I never remember wanting to be part of those games. The feeling that they were beyond me both in intensity and physicality is still with me.

Dad replaced that garage with a covered carport, flat roofed, supported with metal poles. He made it accessible from the alleyway behind the house. The driveway in the yard was torn out and grass planted. Is far as memory serves, dad built that new garage, which it eventually became after adding walls, a shop, and a door. I’m sure Art was a big part of that, as was probably my uncle, various students, and members of the Lucero Ward.

It was then that the alleyway became an extension of our yard, an alternate play space to the street where Art and I would throw the nerf football or a frisbee. 

Dad spent a lot of his free time in that garage. He had his workshop with a bunch of power tools, like a table saw devoid of safety features, a radial arm saw. Both scared me to death. He put in some cabinets that he got from U of U surplus. I think he said they were from a lab. The drawers were filled with nails an screws, one was a well organized drawer with various drill bits, all unusably dull. In later years, he cut an arch in one of the base cabinet doors that the dog slept in. For some reason, the whole garage was stained a dark gray, almost a charcoal black color.

Like the dog, I made a space out there because l would like to be out there when dad was. He had built a storage loft in the rafters that l kept a bunch of toys in. Most that had either survived being dropped from my second story bedroom window, being strapped to one or more Black Cat fire crackers, being smashed on the concrete with dad’s good framing hammer or were about to be. Art also kept his Cox Nitro Baja Bug up there. Which of course I could not resist in spite of being warned to keep my hands off of.

At some point, the basketball backboard reappeared, this time on the alley side of the garage. I remember starting to be a little interested in basketball by then, dad took us to all of the U of U home games. There were a couple of things that made me uneasy about that hoop though. The main one was that old Sister Ally’s (yes, that was her name) was on the other side of the alleyway. Her chain link fence had her grapevines growing on it. She’d get after us if we disturbed the fence too much. She’d especially get after us if we climbed the fence to get the ball, so Art would send me all the way around. 

The other thing that bothered me was that the dog would get super worked up when we were back there. He’d bark and cry at the side gate or bite our ankles and trip us if we let him play.

The backboard had a fluorescent orange sun on it. The suns points and face were cut out of a piece of plywood and screwed to the face of the backboard. i don’t know if it was Art or dad the made the sun. I suspect it was dad because around that time he and mom had gotten involved in a Montessori preschool with my moms brothers, and my guess it was a leftover related to a project for that. 

I do remember playing Horse with Art and dad. Even though I was older by then, I still wasn’t ready to mix it up physically with my brother. My perception of dad then was a little different then too. Still not old, but now no longer my brothers match physically. 

I have a lot of random memories from the alleyway In addition to the games of Horse. Dad converted the very back of the yard to a covered shed for his old boat. For ground cover, instead of concrete, dad had put in pea gravel. The gate for the shed required a dogleg maneuver to back into. Sometimes we had to maneuver the boat in by hand. The trailer tires would bog down in the gravel. Art was always strong enough to man-handle it back in though.

Dad collected Folgers coffee cans to sort his nuts and bolts into. One afternoon my best friend Randy Fox and I were building a bike jump out of dad’s scrap wood. Later, we asked for his help when he got home from work. Not only did he help us finish the ramp, he lined up his Folgers cans to see how many we could clear to test it out. In my memory, he got to about 13 or 14 (probably far fewer) cans before he ran out. That was also getting to the limits of our bicycle jumping skills. I remember shakily making that last jump, just knocking over the last can or two. I distinctly remember Randy Fox, pedals pumping like mad, hitting the ramp, becoming airborne, then inexplicably letting go of his handle bars mid-flight. He drifted off-line, upon touch-down, his chest crashed into his handle bars as his bike careened into Sister Ally’s grapevines and fence. i still remember the look on dad’s face, a mixture of awe and concern, with just a touch of mischievousness in it.

I saw Randy’s dad at a Utes basketball game just the other day, he was very warm in greeting me, after recalling this story, i wonder why.