He found the line and would not leave it. The white baseline at the near edge of the basketball court, where the older kids were running their game, and where our son had decided, at two, that he needed to be. He paced behind it. He watched the ball go up and come down. Every so often he looked back at us, as if to ask why no one had called him in yet.
This was Helen Wills, the small park up in Russian Hill, San Francisco, on an ordinary Saturday. My wife and I were doing what you do at that age, which is mostly follow. He wanders, you wander a step behind. There were snacks. There were the slides, more than once, and the swings, and the slow loop back around to wherever he wanted to go next. A morning like this is not still. It is busy in a low, contented way, the kind of busy you do not mind.
When the players stopped for a break, one of them bounced the ball his way, soft and underhand. He missed it completely. Then he went after it, caught up to it, picked it up in both arms, carried it back to roughly where it came from, and threw it with everything he had in a direction no one was standing. The guys laughed, the good kind, and so did we.
There was no water in sight, but the Bay was in the morning anyway. It came in as weather, the cold gray that comes over the city in June, fog low on the hill the way it gets when the ocean owns the season. By late morning it had started to give. The light went thin, then bright in patches, the gray pulling back a little at a time until the sky behind the buildings turned real blue.
My wife wore the Caledonia Cap, the Mainsail one. When the sun came up over the court she pulled the brim down against it. Sunglasses, a vest, his snacks somewhere in the bag. None of it was arranged. We were just there, the three of us.
He never did get into the game. He stood at that line a long time, watching older boys at something he was still too small for, wanting it plainly and in no hurry, content to be on the near side of it for now.
Eventually he was done with the line and wanted the slide again, so we went. The fog had burned off, the morning was warm, and the three of us got on with the rest of an ordinary Saturday, which was all any of us wanted it to be.
Kevin