The day he died, the four of us were exactly the same height, just over five foot nine. We’d measured the boys in the pantry doorway the week before. It seemed a perfect symmetry, a whole family the same size but in different shapes. Now the children grow past me and past their father. They seem to grow by the day; they sprout like beanstalks towards the sky.
Week after week I continue to watch them at basketball practice with our beloved Coach Geraldine. I listen to how they deepen their voices to holler “BALL!” Coach G. tells Solo, “Get large!” or as his father told him, “Never be smaller than you are.” Be large. I watch how the young men on the team intimidate each other on purpose, how they enact their masculinity, in each other’s faces, controlled aggression that sometimes bursts over, how they manage the aggression. I watch them knock each other down and help each other up. I watch them master the codes of the court and the street. I watch them practice their swag. They are smelling themselves, as the expression goes, literally smelling their funk, feeling the possibility of their maleness. I watch their splendiferous gloating when they make a three-pointer, how they yell “BEAST!” to each other when they snatch a rebound. And I watch how they give each other skin for each job well done, this fellowship of beautiful young men, learning to be mighty together inside of this gym with an inspirational woman coach who loves them and is showing them how to be large, skilled, savvy, young men living fully in their physicality after their father’s body so suddenly stopped working.
Simon’s anklebones appear shiny at his pants’ hems. He complains his feet hurt and indeed his toes have grown and are pushing against the ends of his shoes.
His growing seems avid, fevered. It feels like the insistent force of life itself. Ficre looked forward to seeing his sons grow beyond him. If I could hear him, I would hear him laughing his great laugh at this latest development.