the basketball hoop stood, was the peak of a small hill. Whenever one of us missed a shot, if we weren’t fast enough, the ball would bounce off the backboard and launch down that hill, gathering speed as it went. Though I was an energetic child, I was lazy, lousy at sports. I dreaded chasing the ball down the hill and would make little bargains with Nana so that he would do it instead. When I missed my “S” shot, I promised him I would wash all of his dishes for a week. It took Nana five long strides to get down to the bottom, six strides to get back up.
“Do you think the Chin Chin Man would have liked basketball if he’d grown up playing it?” I asked.
I was setting up a shot from inside the frame of the garage. It was physically impossible to get the ball as high as I would need to in order to sink it from there, but I hadn’t yet studied physics, and I had an abundance of misplaced confidence in my skills. I missed the shot by several feet and chased it down before it could start its descent.
“Who?” Nana said.
“Daddy,” I said, the word sounding strange to my ears. A word from a language I used to speak but was forgetting, like the Twi our parents had taught us when we were small but then had grown too tired to keep up.
“I don’t give a fuck what he thinks,” Nana said.
My eyes widened at the use of the swear word. They were all understood to be forbidden in our house, though our mother used the Twi ones with abandon because she thought we didn’t know what they meant. Nana wasn’t looking at me. He was setting up his shot. I stared at his long arms, the veins tracing their way from biceps to hand, pulsing, exclamation points on those newly formed muscles. He hadn’t answered my question, but it didn’t really matter. He was answering his own question, one whose large, looming presence must have been something of a burden to him, and so he lied to try to get out from under its weight. I don’t care, he told himself every time he spoke to the Chin Chin Man on the phone. I don’t care, when he scored twenty points in a game, looked up to the stands to find his bored sister and mother and no one else. I don’t care.
Nana made the shot from the crest of our driveway’s hill. It was a shot he knew I couldn’t make. He threw the ball at me, hard. I caught it against my chest and told myself not to cry as I walked to the spot where Nana had stood. I stared at the little red target on the backboard and tried to channel everything I had toward it. A couple of months later, Nana would climb a ladder and scrape that red rectangle off, hoping that he would learn to make his shots by feel, by sense memory. I bounced the ball a couple of times and looked at Nana, whose expression was indiscernible. I missed the shot, and the game ended. Well after the sun set that night, Nana was still out in our driveway, shooting free throws against the backdrop of the moon.
* * *
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In Hamilton and Fremouw’s 1985 study on the effects of cognitive behavioral training on basketball free-throw performance, researchers asked three college basketball players with low game-to-practice free-throw ratios to listen to tape recordings with instructions for deep muscle relaxation. The men were also tasked with watching videotapes of themselves playing basketball, while attempting to reconstruct the thoughts they were having in each moment that played back to them. The researchers wanted them to identify any moments when they experienced negative self-evaluation and to instead try to cultivate positive self-statements. So, instead of thinking “I’m the worst. I’ve never been good at anything in my life. How did I even make it onto this team?” they were to aim for “I got this. I’m capable. I’m here for a reason.” By the end of the training program, all three subjects had improved by at least 50 percent.
I don’t know what thoughts ran through Nana’s mind in those days. I wish I did. Because of my career, I would give a lot to be able to inhabit someone else’s body—to think what they’re thinking, feel what they’re feeling. For a copy of Nana’s