Suggested Listening: “On A Beach” by Richard Ashcroft
2017. Life Time Sky. Forty-second Street and Eleventh Avenue in New York City.
I walked through the doors and there it was. On a shiny new indoor basketball court in the most luxurious health club in the city: the Ultimate Hoops logo. On the court. On the doors. On the walls.
This was the city where the idea was first conceived. Where I had played in ragged rec leagues and sworn there was a better way. It was also the city I had left in a pickup truck with all my belongings in the back, certain I was gone for good. That city belonged to the dead now. I had written that sentence fifteen years earlier and I had believed it.
Now the idea had come back through the front door, and its name was on the walls.
The NBA’s Carmelo Anthony was at the Grand Opening. I had a photo taken with him, the two of us standing on the Ultimate Hoops logo.
Then I felt the shift.
Something stirred in me that I had not felt since the beginning. In eleven years I had never once stopped to admire the thing. I was UH’s worst critic. Always tinkering. Always pushing to improve. Every milestone I waved off. Always forward. Never back. The past was too painful and too useless to the second chapter of my life.
But standing on the court at Sky, it all stopped.
It is finished, my inner voice announced.
I left the court, took the elevator to the fitness floor, found an empty office, and called Mary back in Minneapolis.
“I’m done,” I told her.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
I had achieved everything I ever wanted to achieve with Ultimate Hoops. What could top this moment? The logo was on a court in New York City and I was opening it with an NBA star.
When I hung up the phone I wiped my eyes. Took a breath. Went back to the party.
The vision from my bedroom floor was beaming in front of me, in the glow of NYC and the Ultimate Hoops logo. I held the moment as long as it would hold me. Then I turned away and thought about the next chapter of my life. This one was closed.
New York was no longer the land of the dead. With Ultimate Hoops on that floor it was rebirth. The city that had taken the most from me was handing something back, and I stood on the logo and let it.