On Death
I was on the phone with Mike, who told me that Kobe Bryant had died. Eli 18.5 texted me at the same time.It was hard to believe. The halo people are trying to put on Kobe Bryant is too cracked to wear, but there's no denying that he was a major sports figure, one of the greats, someone whose death lands with a big number on the Richter scale.
TMZ reported this first, and I took a look and then went to ESPN. Nothing. Then I went to NBC Sports. Nothing. The Washington Post. Nothing.
It was an eerie feeling, to look at these websites and to realize that in those places, Kobe Bryant was still alive. Things were still normal. The helicopter crash hadn't happened yet.
In 1980, my roommate told me that John Lennon had died, and I didn't believe him. I turned on the radio and waited.
This was different, though. I knew. It's just that I was looking through a time capsule, if only for a few minutes.
I had a dream Saturday night.
I was in an electronics store, one of the old dusty ones that still sells components, and I was back in Austin. It was early in the morning, right after the store opened, and I looked up and saw my friend Andrew, who I hadn't seen in fifteen years.
Andrew looked like Bluto, and he was older now, but still looked that way. He was a complicated fellow, full of rages and regrets, but all of his various insecurities combined into a funny and charming package.
We talked.
I asked about his health, because he had multiple ongoing conditions to manage. He said that he'd recently found out that he had a terminal condition. I asked him how long he had, and he said about six months.
Then I asked him if he'd made his peace with it, and he looked at me and said, "Would you?"
"When you're a kid," I said, "you have a day when you're outside playing, and the weather is perfect, and you can run so fast, and you know that it will be like this forever. When you get older, even when you're in decline, there's always a little part of you that still believes it."
That's when I woke up.
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