Some thoughts on Sports

and a story about building a Fort from my childhood

maybe: ishaan

Gonzaga and UCLA played one of the best basketball games of all time last night during the NCAA Tournament's Semi-Finals. A friend mentioned that a Reddit Person commented, ‘I don’t even watch basektball and that was one of the best sporting events I’ve seen in my life!’ This person is spot on. I will remember this game for the rest of my life. While sitting on the couch and witnessing the game, I went through a physical and emotional journey comparable to watching a horror movie, riding a roller coaster, or texting someone you really like and waiting desperately for their response. Oh, man. What a freaking game.

So many of my conversations recently have revolved around the NCAA Tournament and sports in general. The Pandemic has made me really appreciate sports as a shared sub-culture. When the NBA came back, my mood perked up, and my texting / face-timing of friends surged. At the same time, this stuff is a little ridiculous, a little too primal, and can feel absolutely meaningless to the uninitiated. I wanted to write a story exploring sports fandom through the NCAA Tournament context, including what it means to not be a part of this sub-culture. That would be a pretty fun story, right? Well, unfortunately, I am too swept up at the moment to fully step back and write about it. I hope to release the story by the end of April, so well, you know, that’s something to look forward to.

Instead, here’s a piece from a collection of childhood stories I am working on. I hope it becomes a book someday. Sort of a memoir of my life from ages 0-10. Like most of my work at the moment, it’s incomplete, but I hope by sharing it, I can give it a little more love and attention that might help it blossom.

What moments do you remember from your childhood?

Ishaan

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Forts

Mummy often left us home alone when I was seven or eight, and Riya was four or five. Since Riya was left in my care, I thought I was a qualified babysitter. We lived in an apartment in Perth Amboy, NJ, the first of three suburb stops on my parent's post-India immigration itinerary. My parents were always paranoid about everything and feared authority figures. They worried they were flirting with New Jersey’s Housing Occupancy Limits since we had four people living in a one-bedroom apartment. Anytime the Super came to fix something, Mummy forced me to hide until he was gone. I would daydream underneath my parents’ king-sized bed, ears perked up for signs of the coast being clear, chin resting on my forearms. Meanwhile, Mummy swept away my toys and crafts into unsuspecting closets and underneath couches, burying the artifacts of my existence and removing me from the Goel archeological record.

While Mummy was gone, we built a fort in our living room, using our maroon, clothed, flower tattooed sofa, along with its perfectly square cushions and the orange coffee table for scaffolding. We draped our parent’s comforter over the surprisingly firm structure to secure the roof. Smaller sofa cushions and stray pillows scrounged from the bedroom were wedged into remaining crevices, making our fortress impenetrable. How could any intruder get us now? The fort was a reassuring, fool-proof form of protection should someone break in while mummy was gone.

I still don’t know where Mummy went whenever she left, but she couldn’t have gone far. We only had one car then, a murky dark green Dodge Grand Caravan, which Papa drove to the local NJ Transit train station each morning before boarding the train to work in Manhattan. I still cannot believe Papa chose this as his first car in America. Although the car was American-made, we were not, making us misfits even amidst Indian immigrants with Toyotas and Hondas. The minivan’s bold green stood out for years in youth sports league parking lots, and we never had any trouble finding it in mall parking lots; the car key fob rarely provoked the car to have a panic attack. It was our starter car until we purchased a White Toyota Corolla and a Grey Toyota Sienna eight years later, finally blending in with other South Asian immigrant families.

Mummy likely only left us for thirty-minute spurts, perhaps to visit a friend in one of the other apartment buildings nearby, but we felt like we were in that fort for hours and days at a time, prepared to start a new life inside if she didn’t make it back.