The Word of the Day is Available

By Ashlee Gadd

On the second day of middle school, we can’t help but ask twenty questions at the dinner table. What’s it like? How are you feeling about this transition? Are you making any new friends? Anything you want to tell us? 

Our new sixth-grader shrugs a lot and gives one word answers, a typical eleven-year-old boy response. When we press in more, he finally says, “Well, there is one thing.”

I hold my breath, bracing myself for impact. Here it comes. Drugs. Bullying. Bad things happening on cell phones. Worse. 

“I wish I could play basketball at lunch,” he tells us.

I exhale a gallon of oxygen.

“What do you mean? What’s stopping you from playing basketball at lunch?” my husband asks. 

Apparently the PE teachers roll out a bin of balls during lunchtime, but most of them are old and flat. I relax back into my chair, abundantly grateful to hear that retrieving a “good” basketball is my son’s biggest middle school issue. Surely we can do something about this. I consider the proximity working in our favor: our house sits directly behind the middle school. We literally share a fence with the basketball court.

“Ev, why don’t you just text us at lunchtime, and we can pop a ball over the fence?” I suggest. 

He sits up straighter in his chair. “Wait, really? Could we really do that?” 

I look at my husband—who is more prone to following rules than I am—and he shrugs, “Sure, why not?”

Right then and there, we add “can u throw me a basketball?” to the text options on his Gabb watch. I am not sure who is more thrilled by this arrangement: Ev, who is delighted to shoot hoops with his friends during lunch, or me, whose sixth grade son now has a reason to text her during the day.