Sunset in the cage

Evening is falling and we are in the cage. Shooting hoops. Me and Cheryle. She made sure I knew it was pronounced like “share “elle”. “Not the other way. It’s different". And so is she. I don’t work here. I am just visiting. But I need to connect so the basketball and the hoop work fine. Even in the cage.The cage is a 30 by 30 extension to the secure treatment program. It is all the “outdoors” you get when you are living here. Everything else is locked, so no-one is going outside for a short walk, or a quiet moment under the trees. If you want the outdoors, it is only found through the windows, or in the cage. Imagine 90 days of this.

Cherlye is better at this than me – better at shooting hoops, and better at being in the cage. She handles both with the same grace. I fumble along. She accepts the cage. I hate it. It is the best I can do.

Slap. Slap, Swish. That’s Cherlye. Blop. Blop. Rebound. That’s me. But she is patient. Gives me tips. Helps me out. I forget we are in the cage and, I think, for a moment, so does she. Connected, as Mark and Karen might say, in the activity. Lost and found somewhere inside the experience of the moment. I mention them because I thought about what I had learned from them as Cheryle and I played 21. I thought about a lot of things.

Like how, when this is all you got, you may as well make the best of it. Like, when there is just you, the youth and the basketball, the world recedes. Like, in activity one finds the other . . . if one is lucky.

The cage is open on the top. I imagine how, during the day, the sun streams in unfiltered by the wire that surrounds the moment. But right now it is late afternoon – early evening actually – and the sun, what there is of it, filters in through the wire mesh, casting patterns across the small court. We bounce the ball on a wire mesh shadow.

Slap. Slap. Swish. That’s Cheryle. And then she holds the ball for a moment. “Look at the sunset," she says. So I do. It is stunning. Red burns the sky. Clouds reflect the intensity of the daily cycle of life. It is stunning.

"I watch it every day,” she says.

"And so will I”, I think. Even in the cage.

Thom