Page 32 - Demo

sense to me had the entire floor been paved, but concrete only covered roughly a third of the space in the barn. The rest was loose, sandy dirt, a surface I struggled to imagine transforming into a sheet of ice. But what would I know. Most of the floor, both concrete and dirt, was littered with more than a hundred tennis balls. I began collecting these, consolidating them into two plastic buckets. They were nearly all accounted for when my dad’s silhouette appeared in the doorway.
“I think I can do two rounds, but my shoulder’s a bit sore,” he said as he gathered some of the last straggling green spheres from a corner near the door. “We’ll just have to play it by ear.”
I nodded, understanding.
Naturally, my dad played baseball in high school. It had even been for the same high school that I was now attending, which I considered to be one of the sole bright spots about our relocation, especially when it came to sports. It did feel neat to be wearing the same jersey as he had (this may as well be taken literally, as the school had not replaced the jerseys in more than a decade and would not do so until after I left). Varsity had been the highest level he would experience though, as my dad would have always best embodied the student side of “student-athlete.” Still, upon entering his twenties he soon found himself entrenched in Cross-Fit, and I had watched him compete in several events as I grew up. Every morning before he’d leave for work, I’d hear him relentlessly pushing himself on our back porch, slaving away with jump-ropes and burpees. Plus, he could still play. He’d routinely kick my butt in games of stick or