time * place * soul

The Boxer (and the Writer) November, 1974 Someone, I believe it was Steve Imber, began roasting a dinner roll over the candle at the center of the table. Others took up the challenge, jabbing their forks into rolls and holding them over the single flame. Before the roll experiment, we sat awkwardly, six boys in sports coats and slacks who had nothing in common except being invited there by me. Now a bit of mischief united us. Suddenly the volume was turned up on my bar mitzvah dinner. While the adults sat eating dessert and drinking coffee, we snuck away and descended on the site of that bar mitzvah celebration, Kansas City’s new Alameda Plaza Hotel. Steve Imber led the way again. With the same enterprise it took to produce the roasted dinner roll, Steve waded into the down escalator and began running up. Everyone followed. A long period of backward escalator riding ensued. We we’re running down the up escalator when Mark Pelofsky pointed him out loitering on the bottom floo...

I’m watching my favorite basketball player, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, on TV lope up the court, his long arms dangling on either side of him, his face impassive. Setting up to the left of the basket, he takes a pass and shoots his patented “sky” hook shot: thrusting off his left foot, his body rises above the court, torso twisting right, right arm following in an arc. As his arm reaches the top of its semicircular path, above his seven-foot-two-inch frame, the ball gently rolls off his fingertips – almost more magic trick than athletic feat. After the game, I go outside and shoot sky hooks at the basket nailed to the roof above the garage. I’m careful to execute each sky hook exactly as Kareem does, even though it’s bordering on the preposterous for a five-foot-something 12-year-old to be attempting a shot designed to maximize the height advantage of a man more than seven feet tall – even if I am tall for my age. To mimic the sky hook, I record the physical Kareem in my memory and my mu...

On a snow-covered Sunday morning in February I sloshed through suburban Kansas City in my family’s rusting, forest green Bel Air with my friend Tom. Fifty white boxes stuffed with bagels, lox and cream cheese were stacked on the back seat. The night before I had stayed up all night with my B’nai B’rith Youth Organization chapter preparing the prepaid packages for delivery to Jewish families throughout Kansas City, the group’s annual fundraiser. I drove through the winding streets of a Leawood, Kan., subdivision clinging to the steering wheel, exhausted. Tom, who was Catholic, sat beside me munching on leftover, unclaimed Lender’s bagels. The Chevy Bel Air, the first car my dad had purchased new, in 1966, had by 1978 known prouder times. Rust spotted the body and covered the roof; the front seat was marred by gaping holes, which my father had concealed with prickly seat covers. The trunk was inexplicably sealed shut (Tom said that missing Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa was buried...