>>The grown man and the kid met under the worst possible circumstances, especially for the kid.
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>>It was September of 2005 in Houston in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The grown man had wanted to head south much sooner, directly after Katrina turned the Gulf Coast into kindling and the city of New Orleans into a soup bowl full to the brim. He was working through the slow auspices of his volunteer organization in Chicago, a delay he regrets to this day. So by the time they got moving, Houston it was. The Big Easy had been evacuated.
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>>The grown man was part of one of two main groups operating out of a black Baptist church in northwest Houston. One was the group from Chicago and the other was from a fundamentalist church in San Diego. There wasn’t really room for 100 or more overnight guests but some way space was found. When they had been going 16 hours a day 6 solids on an air mattress on the gym floor felt like heaven. They just sort of accepted that they had made the choice to step out of their normal comfort zone and were going to do what needed to be done.
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>>The gym floor was where the grown man slept, grateful to have it. It was the main congregating point not only for sleepers – not the LUCKY ones who got to sleep in hallways upstairs, lol – but for meals and morning meetings with daily assignments. There was a well stocked kitchen and some skilled cooks in the crowd who made sure everyone was well fed.
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>>It was also a basketball gym, and that was where he met the kid. He never did know his name and doesn’t know where he is now. Under no other circumstances would they probably have met at all.
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>>The grown man picked up a ball. Bounced it, didn’t like the bounce, found an air pump in a storage locker, and inflated it to the correct level. Took some shots, trying to shed the emotional weight of the week for a few minutes.
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>>One of the San Diego women called him over to where she was sitting in the stands after helping with lunch. “Ask him to shoot with you, dummy,” she said. He was so disassociated he had hardly noticed the kid there.

UPDATE: Warning to all, avoid this woman. She is a stalker. She cast me under her spell and has a long history of posting online under aliases. The sad part about this conversation is I talked on the phone with her several times on that trip to Houston, including once in the parking lot at the church late at night and once at a rest area in Missouri on the drive down in the middle of the night. She really had me going, thinking I had met the love of my life. At least my daughters are smarter than me because they never believed a word of her story.

>
>Oh, brother! Such a boring tale. Can tell it is fiction. Real life it is not. Just made up words. Too bad you were not there.
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>>He asked the kid if he wanted to shoot and the kid said okay. Kids can really say a lot with okay. He came out on the court and they traded shots silently for a while. The kid was probably 8 or 9 and had some ability. It was backyard basketball in the old way – you hit the shot and you get to shoot the ball again. Back to you, let’s see that one again. OK, now let’s see it from a step back. Or do it 5 times in a row from right there.
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>>The grown man would like to think he made a little difference with that one kid that week. Lord knows he was shipwrecked. He never knew his dad. His mom and his sister had lit off for parts unknown when the storm hit. He said maybe they went to her sister’s in Tennessee, but he didn’t know where in Tennessee. He said the phone didn’t work any more. The grown man managed to keep his heart from breaking on the floor in a million pieces. They kept trading shots.

Oh, I was definitely there and can still feel myself there.

I wish I didn't have a sinking feeling who you really are.