A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball Read Online Free PDF Page A

own childhood.
    My sister has always said that one of her jobs in the family has been to remember everything that’s happened along the way. “So I can remind you in case you forget” is what she says.
    Not that I’ve forgotten anything. It’s just that up until now, I’ve had to block a lot of it out.
    But no more. If I want to be the Daddy I promised myself as a child that I was going to be, it’s time to go back there and do the remembering myself.

    WHENEVER I GO HUNT FOR MEMORIES FROM CHILDHOOD, THE most vivid recollections that come to mind are of my grandma and me sitting out on the stoop of our apartment building on the corner of Fifty-Ninth and Prairie. Probably the earliest memory I have of the two of us out there together took place on a night in early spring 1987, a few months after my fifth birthday.
    There’s a sound track that accompanies this memory: a radio blasting R&B from someone’s apartment, a boom box across the street with the bass turned all the way up and somebody rapping to the beat, police sirens and gunfire at enough of a distance not to run and hide, and car tires screeching as they speed along the wet pavement of Prairie Avenue.
    And then, in the middle of that hum of the nighttime sound track could be heard the sad vocal of my grandmother crying and praying out loud: “Oh Lawd, Lawd, please help me get outa this mess. Lawd, please help me with these children caught up in they trouble, Lawd.”
    There were many nights when I heard her cry and pray like that. Why this night stands out, I don’t know, except that this could have been the first time that I made a promise to myself never to do the things, whatever they were, that made my grandma sad and worried like she was. Not because of how bad those things were (even though I had some general ideas already) but because of how much I loved my grandmother and wanted her to be happy.
    Grandma had lived in the apartment on the top floor of the three-story building since the early 1970s, along with her son Roger, our uncle, who worked as a security guard in those days. We had only moved into the apartment on the first floor the year before. As Tragil could better recall about the previous four and a half years since my birth, they had been turbulent for us and for our mom, especially after she called it quits with Dad. With our mother’s initial descent into the clutches of drugs, Tragil and I were separated from her at different times when we stayed with friends and relatives, while our two older sisters, Deanna and Keisha, in their teens, stayed with other family members. Dad remained in the picture but probably didn’t know the extent of our situation. The thing was that even when she was “in her madness”—as we would say to refer to Mom’s battles—a lot of people loved and believed in her, and went the extra mile to help out with her kids until she was able to get on her feet and have us all under one roof again.
    At last, that day had come when Mom got off drugs and found a steady part-time job. Grandma was then able to talk the landlord into letting us move into the same building as her. When we arrived, the landlord and his family lived on the second floor but pretty soon he moved out and my aunt Barbara started renting that apartment. Because of his close relationship with Grandma, the landlord was lenient with Mom on those occasions when the rent was late. When the electric bill was late, that was another story. We had a hot plate and lights that we’d hook up to an outlet in the hallway and we had to run to unplug the cords whenever the landlord was coming.
    None of those worries bothered me and Tragil much. At first. We were struggling, yeah. But we had our momma back and we were a family again. We had our own bedroom, Tragil and I, that we shared. We’d go shopping as a family once a month, with help from welfare, and we had a regular schedule. Some of my happiest really early memories of my mother come from this