Day 16

Outside my habitat, at nearly 10 pm, a basketball bouncing.

This year will be a cypher in the annals of basketball, a season cut before it bloomed. Yet my habitat-mate predicts a boom next year, or later, when today's ten-year-olds come into their prowess, in free throw shooting percentage. Everywhere we go walking we see children, properly isolated, shooting baskets in their driveways.

This isn't game time. There's no game going, just baskets being shot.

Certainly, there are, and will be, people exhausting themselves by bedsides, fogging up their face masks as they run from room to room. Those in the beds will be fighting, too. There are wins to be tallied on the big board, and losses.

But in my habitat this evening, the two of us are trying to find sense in words, putting thoughts together, rubbing our chins, erasing, trying again. We're trying things out.

From the bottled-messages I've been getting, it sounds like everybody's trying things. Sauces are being made, fussed over, and made again the next night. Brushes are being dipped in ink and watercolor paint. Long-neglected decks of cards are being taken out and shuffled.  People have been walking all day by the window, trying to get their steps in.

It's the boredom, and the restless energy, the need for distraction from the news and the unknown future. We need something to do, and the usual business isn't happening, so we're out here trying things, trying again, heaving free throws, one after another, late into the night. Quietly, you can hear the Eye of the Tiger bass line starting to crank up in the background.
Bum. Bum bum Bum. Bum bum Bum. Bum bum Bummm...

Game time will come again soon enough. For now, it's montage time.