Project 2 : Narrative 2 : Observe

They only came out at night that summer. Once the sun had set and the neighborhood kids went inside, the sound of the garage door opening indicated their departure from the depths of the house next door. What they did inside all day was an unsolved mystery to my friend Tira and I, but at night we had an opportunity to fulfill our curiosities and watch the neighbor boy and his friends partake in a nightly ritual of basketball.

These boys were the highlight of our day, watching them seemed to enlighten some unknown insights of an unruly tribe. Of course we went to school with boys, but they were the ones we watched grow into gross beings that ate glue and made fart noises with their arm pits. The boys playing basketball in the driveway next door were nearly a year or two older and they went to the public school, these characteristics alone made us want to know more about this particular breed of boy.

We had a few almost perfect spots in my house for sneaking peeks at our subjects of interest as our house merely sat feet away from their driveway. If we arranged ourselves in a certain way, we could get a decent view out of my sister’s bedroom. After negotiating with her to go do something better, we would shut out the lights and go to the far end of the windows and peer through the mini-blinds. Being the taller of the two, I would awkwardly stand and Tira would take the lower tier, kneeling just above the edge of the windowsill. We would carefully pry open the blinds just enough to catch the boys’ shadows, if we moved further to the right we had a full view of the scene before us. Occasionally one of them would come even closer to retrieve the ball that went into the yard, we would then quietly snort and giggle at the near risk of losing our cover.

In this position we were able to accurately study the boys in their activity of play. We recognized right away that they were not the best of basketball players; they even lowered the basketball goal to get a better success rate at their slam dunk shots. This didn’t matter to us as we found this to be a humbling factor. Every once in awhile they would bring out the round single trampoline and prop it up slightly to create a perfect angle allowing them to get a better jump in on their dunks. They would call each other “Jordan” and high-five after a good 5 minutes of consistent rotations of dunks. They had this play down to a science.

After several summer nights of risking our cover to satisfy our obsessive inquiry, Tira and I began to cut back on the number of nights we viewed the boys from behind the blinds. Ironically, their nightly practice of basketball tricks came to a halt. We wondered then if this was just a clever production put on for our amusement.