For most people who know me, it would come as a surprise that I’m a sports fan at all. After all, I’ve spent most of my life engaged in the intellectual. My above-the-rim game has mostly been the one that concerns the development of analytical skills, not to mention honing my craft as a writer. In many ways I was a late bloomer, organized sports included. Puberty and my ten-inch gain in height from the middle of seventh grade to the middle of ninth grade and my mother’s genes were what made me naturally interested in sports.

It wasn’t until the end of ’82 that I became fully interested in football, ’83 when I became a baseball fan and ’84 when I started rooting for the lowly New York Rangers. Over the years, I’ve also become an ex-baseball fan (thanks to Al Campanis, Bob Costas, Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden, not to mention the ’94 lockout), a golf enthusiast (prior to Tiger Woods, mind you), and even watch futbol from time to time.

But my favorite sport has always been basketball. I never really had a choice. My mother played basketball in high school in segregated rural Arkansas in the mid-60s and helped lead her team to the state semifinals in ’65. My uncles on my mother’s side all played basketball in high school, and one made it to the University of Houston (3 years) and to the NBA’s Houston Rockets (1 year, ’82-’83; they went 14 and 68 that year). One of my first vague memories was watching the Knicks of Walt “Clyde” Frazier, Dave DeBusschere, Willis Reed, Bill Bradley, Dick Barnett, Earl “The Pearl” Monroe and reserves in the ’73 playoffs on their way to the team’s second championship in four years. By the time I was old enough to know what I was watching, the Knicks were in decline, but my mother still occasionally watched (whenever we had a TV to watch them, that is).

When I turned my attention to sports in ’82, I knew more about the Knicks than I did about any other team, so of course I watched. The Micheal Ray Richardson affair of promise, drugs and bitter disappointment were followed by Bernard King’s rise as a scoring machine and his patented turn-around jump shot before he blew out his right knee in a meaningless game in ’85. Those Knicks sucked pretty bad during my teenage years. Hubie Brown was their coach most of those years, and he created controversies of his own, including calling Darrell Walker a “dog” more than one during a practice.

After all of the losing and dumb newspaper quotes, they won the inaugural NBA Draft lottery in ’85, picking my man Patrick Ewing that year. The Knicks still sucked for the next couple of years. But Ewing and the Knicks gave me a small miracle to hold on to on Xmas Day ’85. Trailing by something like 20 or 25 points, Ewing and Trent Tucker and the rest of the Knicks beat the Celtics of Bird, Parrish and McHale at MSG. I lived on that victory as a Knicks fan for nearly two years, during some of the worst times of my life. That victory reminded me that miracles do happen, and that we, I, can make them happen.

The post-Ewing years have not been kind to me. The Knicks have only been to the playoffs once in the past six years, haven’t been a good product to watch on the court, have had good coaches who’ve turned bad (Larry Brown) or bad coaches throughout. They’ve traded away enough draft picks to make Golden State and the L.A. Clippers better teams. The owner has the basketball management smarts of an amoeba. I’m embarrassed for anyone who’s expected to play for Isiah Thomas under these conditions. Maybe we should have Bloomberg or Trump by the team from Nolan — neither of them can do any worse.

Yet I remember those times like Xmas ’85, when the Knicks did the unexpected, the nearly miraculous, and it reminds me that all things pass in time and that all things are possible for all of us who believe they are. I hold on to those moments because they remind me that emotions and the spirit can soar even when everything seems to be going wrong. My Knicks may be sorry now, but as a fan I know that this won’t last forever.

I’m a day late in making this week’s post, and also a day late in celebrating a cheery little anniversary. Yesterday was the 12th anniversary of my first date with my wife of nearly eight years. Happy Anniversary Honey!

I didn’t forget. I just got caught up in the things of life, like doing my current job, looking for another jobs wondering whether an agent will be bold enough to represent me and Boy At The Window. Paying bills, scanning pictures of my son, wondering if I’ve made any mistakes quite as stupid as any Michael Vick has in the past six years. All kept coming up over the course of the day. I did at least say the words “Happy Anniversary” while getting my son ready for school yesterday morning. Even as introspective as I normally am, the cares of our lives and this world can trip us up. So it was yesterday.

But you know, since I now have the time to write about this anniversary, let me tell you all (especially my son) about how I met my wife. It started in the spring of ’90 with a mutual friend named Bryan. I knew him because he was part of my inner circle of friends and acquaintances from my sophomore and junior years at the University of Pittsburgh. My wife knew him because she supervised him and other staff at a market research firm in downtown Pittsburgh.

Bryan decided to throw himself an apartment-warming party that April. He invited us, telling each of us that the other would be there, that the other was attractive or intelligent or quirky. My wife has always assumed that Bryan tried to set us up because we were the two tallest Blacks that he knew. Probably so, seeing that in our circle, I towered over just about everyone by at least seven or eight inches. But I’d like to think that Bryan saw our weirdnesses complementing each other well.

It was just that his timing was off by about five years. I can’t completely speak for my wife, but I’d seen her on campus enough times to know that she was dating a Pitt football player (an automatic strike as far as I was concerned). Plus, my main focus that semester had been to find balance in my life as a student, between my assumed role as an excelling nerd, my 15-hour a week work-study job and hanging out with friends. Still, even with that balance and several all-nighters hangin‘ out in hole-in-the-wall clubs with my circle, I found myself on the verge of a 4.0 semester with a week and a half of the semester to go.

So I had plenty of reasons to be excited about myself by the time I’d had my second margarita of the evening, one that was sweet, strong and too much for my liver to process. It was at this point that Bryan formally introduced me to my future wife, almost a decade before we actually got married. In my wife’s version of this story, I said, “Hi, I’m Donald and I have a 4.0,” which given all of my immediate history of ridicule, scorn and suffering, doesn’t make any sense. I was too impressed by her height and her soft brown skin to have said anything about my grades right off the bat. She was wearing a pink and white blouse with a dark denim skirt that fanned out a bit, not to mention high heels.

I settled in for a conversation about our mutual lives as Pitt students, knowing somehow that I wasn’t interested in dating her. She asked me about how school was going. I’m sure at that point I mentioned the 4.0 thing. I know that she took my excitement about my semester as arrogance, but she did ask the question. I thought that her response and her ‘Burgh-like accent was weird, as well as the fact that she was dating a football player. I guess that we didn’t hit it off.

It all would’ve ended that night after Bryan’s margaritas had given me the runs if I hadn’t taken an interviewer job at my wife’s former company a couple of weeks later. She was my supervisor for a couple of weeks. I guess during that time she’d seen and heard enough from me to realize that I cared about a lot of other things besides grades. We kept in touch as friends by mail that summer, would occasionally bump into each other and go out to eat or see a movie in the year or two after that, and then lost touch for a few years.

When we bumped into each other on the bus in May ’95, we made sure to stay in touch at that point. After a few months of hanging out as friends — and one loony three-month relationship with another woman (small “r” relationship) — she invited me to her company’s Xmas party. The rest, as they say, is history.

Except that relationships and marriages are complicated unions. They take unexpected twists and turns, leave you head over heels or in an emotional hell and involve an enormous investment of your entire being if you care about the union’s success and growth and love your partner. It hasn’t been easy being married. But given how my first two crushes from so long ago ended, I know that I have enjoyed and cherished so much of this ride with my wife over the past dozen years.

One of the lingering effects of living a complicated life of abuse, poverty, concealment and imagination is that I generally don’t expect people to give me anything, including opportunities. Although I’m much, much better at accepting gifts, compliments, affection and opportunities than I used to be, I’m still not at a place where it all comes with the ease of someone who’s lived a charmed life, who has no expectations other than a life of giving to and receiving from others.

For almost all of us, our willingness to give and receive is set by our families, our parents and their ability to share themselves and their emotions with us, and not just presents and other gifts of things. In my case, we were all failures in this. It was difficult enough in ’78, ’79 and ’80. The last year of the ’70s was also the last time we (meaning me, my older brother Darren, and my newborn brother Maurice) would celebrate Christmas at all. Our gifts were meager–winter gloves, a pair of corduroys and some socks — but at least we had something that we desperately needed. We had an artificial tabletop Christmas tree that my mother had dutifully decorated. She promised, “It’ll be better next year.” Xmas ’79 was one of the last times I remember my mother saying “I love you” to each of us.

Well, it didn’t get any better the next year. The only good news was that we had plenty of food to eat, between my mother picking up the supplies for our Xmas dinner from a food pantry and her temporary separation from my stepfather. This food-filled holiday would prove to be the last one we’d acknowledge as Christmas until I was a high school senior.

With the return of my stepfather in ’81 came the Hebrew-Israelite era and four years without Xmas. No trees — artificial or otherwise — no Jesus, no Santa for my younger siblings to remember. All of this would’ve been more bearable if we had celebrated Hanukkah — the holiday that was allegedly one that the Lost Tribes could adopt. But because we didn’t have food in our humble abode the last three to ten days of any given month during those years, Hanukkah was not an eight-day festival of lights, giving or thanksgiving. It was an acknowledged but uncelebrated holiday. Neither my mother nor my stepfather put more than three candles in our menorah during Hanukkah. From ’81 to ’84, our new religion never yielded an opportunity to celebrate any giving or any miracles of oil or light.

By the time I had given up on my stepfather and the Hebrew-Israelites in ’84, I’d gotten used to not thinking about anyone giving me anything to hang on to at all. Even my conversion to Christianity didn’t make me someone receptive to receiving anything positive from folks in my life. I think that all of this set me up for the small miracle of December ’85, twenty-two years ago this date. It was the day that my second crush began, the one that would leave me depressed and disillusioned two years later. It was the day that my soon-to-be-obsession with a tall and popular girl from Mount Vernon High School would smile at me with more joy and affection than I’d seen from anyone in years (at least that’s how I interpreted it at the time). It was a smile that would leave me head over heels — like the Tears for Fears song by the same name that was popular at the time — giddy and nervous and constantly questioning my unconsciously emotionless and rational self for the next twenty-two months.

Her smile was a gift that I needed, received and purposefully squandered for the next couple of years because it’d been so long since I knew what to do with any gift. Since I no longer had a point of reference, a simple smile of attraction became a splinter in my mind, something that took the tweezers of maturity to pull out.

Still, even with that surgery, my adult years have been an evolutionary process in terms of giving and receiving. Because of how I grew up, it was always much easier to give to people in my life than to receive, to the point that I didn’t want folks to give me much of anything. I always saw it as a process that would have string attached. Yet, as my wife can attest, I sometimes complained when folks wouldn’t even think to give me a card or a telephone call or send an email of thanks or give without prompting. It’s been this kind of inconsistent behavior on my part that has left others scratching their heads over the years.

These days (say the last decade or so), I’m a recovering selfish giver. Every once in a while I fall off the wagon, only to find my way to repentance and staying on the path of giving and receiving, out of need or want or because it’s just plain fun to help others and for others to be there for me. It’s been a long and hard road just to reach this point. The even better news, though, is that I’ve been celebrating Xmas for the past fourteen years, making it easier for my son to see what giving and receiving is all about.

Along the lines of my last post, next month for me is usually a time of reflection, of giving thanks and of remembering emotional highs and lows. My birthday’s two days after Xmas, making it hard on the folks in my life who’ve given me gifts over the years (most years I haven’t received gifts for either). Over the past 38 Decembers (not counting the one starting on Sunday), I’ve been smitten with attraction (December 3, 1985), run away from home (December 8, 1978), been mugged by four teenage boys (December 5, 1983), experienced burnout (December ’87 and December ’89) and betrayal (December ’96), not celebrated Chanukah (December ’81, ’82 and ’83), and have experienced holiday joy and summoned up the resolve to make next year a better one.

I used to think that the period between the end of November and the end of February was the season of miracles small and large. That I could fall in serious like for anyone in ’85 — with my second crush (see blogs from July and September) — seemed almost miraculous considering my sober and emotionally detached self at the time. Surviving my third semester at Pitt after homelessness and financial starvation made my December that year especially thankful. Despite my thesis chair and committee, I was beyond happy about finishing my dissertation and having their approval (even if it meant that my post-doctoral career remained cloudy). But the resulting burnout from two rough fall semesters at Pitt and a long and contentious thesis process also helped me understand why many people get depressed this time of the year. In the end, what do all of the pluses and minuses that make up the highs and lows of our lives really mean at the end of the year?

Although I have sometimes felt like a failure, I’ve come to see December as a month of reflection and rebirth, partly because of my birthday and the month’s significance, and partly because of the things that have happened in my life in December. It’s only a season of miracles if you are willing to see yourself and your survival of the year as a miracle in and of itself. Reflection allows you to build on the successes — no matter how few and fleeting — that you experienced during the year and can sustain you into the next one. A rebirth is your willingness to recognize where you’ve fallen short and determining which parts of your life you’re unwilling to fall short in again.

So despite the colder weather and decline in sunlight, the depression, disappointments and drama that has been more Decembers than not for me, the last month of the year is my favorite one. So many of the stories contained in Boy At The Window are ones that come out of or lead somehow to the month of my birth. Even the relationship that became my marriage began in a December twelve years ago (more on that in a later blog).

For those of you who find yourselves depressed or disillusioned by the storms of life, all I can say is that some of my best Decembers have been ones where consumer-based gift-giving hasn’t happened at all or has played a minor role in the holiday season. I’ve usually given of myself in love or trust or out of faith or need. I’ve found myself making plans for the next year or next several years. I’ve often left myself open for good and new things to happen in my life. Most importantly, I’ve found myself looking back at my past and realizing that I have survived so much and overcome so much more, that anything I face now can’t possibly be as horrifying as the circumstances of my youth and young adulthood.

This isn’t a call to suck it up as much as it is one for all of us to put our lives in perspective. To make this season my season and yours as one of humility and thanksgiving and not so much one of shopping and eating. Take it from me, as an authority on how to make this season mean something despite the lack of money or food, Decembers are so much better when you take the time to put your life in perspective and balance.

I’m just as guilty of this as everyone else. It’s a common human affliction really. This not taking stock of our world and our lives, not finding anything to feel thankful about. Comedians like George Carlin and Lewis Black are right about this, hilariously funny, but right. Thanksgivings are an opportunity to combine three uniquely American activities: shopping, gluttonous eating, and watching NFL players knock the stuffing out of each other all afternoon and evening.

I may not eat to the point of puking on Thanksgiving (I usually do all the cooking, so I’m usually not hungry by the time the table’s set anyway) or participate in the annual American pastime of getting ready for Xmas the day after at the nearest malls. I do watch some football, although I’m not a big fan of Dallas or Detroit (the two teams that normally play on Turkey Day). But I must admit that I don’t take time out as much as I used to to say thanks — to God, for my family, for those who’ve been there for me, for all the good that remains in me and in my life.

And on Thanksgiving week especially, there have been important moments in my past for me to remember. I sometimes need to remind myself that though life hasn’t always been great, these moments make life worth living. One of the most important ones occurred nineteen years ago, in the aftermath of my five days of homelessness on the University of Pittsburgh’s campus in the fall of ’88. The revelation that I needed help — and lots of it — to make it through the semester and through college was obvious even after I found a place to live. Right after Labor Day, I sorted out all of my financial aid issues, completely paying off my room and board bill from last year. I found myself with only $450 left over for the semester, even with students loans, Challenge Scholarship, and Pell Grant in hand. Once I accounted for books, food, linens, a new Walkman and other basic needs, I only had a little more than $200 left over. That was by the third week in September.

Even working at CIS didn’t help. Because of my five days in search for a living space, I didn’t get on the computing lab work schedule for September. Pitt paid all of its employees, Work-Study and otherwise, once a month and in arrears. My first full paycheck wouldn’t be until the end of November. I felt screwed. I survived homelessness only to face a major financial crisis, one that left little margin for error. I could’ve saved the forty-five dollars I spent on the new Walkman for some food.

I paid my $140 in rent on time at the beginning of October, and stretched the remaining $70 as much as I could. I made my mother’s favorite cheap meal for one week, five-dollar spaghetti with broccoli. With seasoning and Kool-Aid at home, who needed anything else? With all my efforts, the spaghetti and not-so-meaty meat sauce lasted most of the week. Week two was pork neck bones and rice with spinach, the first time I’d eaten a significant amount of pig since the pre-Hebrew Israelite days. Week three was a vat of tuna fish “salad,” which was mixed with just a tiny bit of scraped-from-the-bottom Miracle Whip with salt and pepper. By the end of that week, I couldn’t eat tuna from a can anymore, and I still haven’t to this day.

The end of October rolled around with few prospects and another drop in my weight. I was sick of Kool-Aid made with bad Pittsburgh water and peanut butter sandwiches. My money was so short that I finally swallowed my pride and asked for help. I first asked Regis, after he noticed that we weren’t even hanging out at the Roy Rogers in the Cathedral of Learning. After I told him about my starvation diet, he said, “Man, I can at least bring you some bread and a potata. We don’t want you out here starvin’.” Later that week, Regis actually gave me some bread and a small sack of potatoes. I bummed a few dollars off of Marc, enough to add a hamburger and some chips to my diet of peanut butter crackers and peanut butter sandwiches. Others got into the act, including Lee, who shared some of his dinner with me a couple of times back at Welsford.

I also started donating plasma through Sera–Tec’s South Oakland “lab” twice a week to supplement my lack of income. It required me to lie next to winos, homeless men, and college students apparently doing this for similar reasons or because it was part of their hazing as frat pledges. I made $75 for six sessions of donating enough plasma to save many lives. The IVs the technicians used and reused they also stuck in the same place in my right arm. So much so that several doctors in the decade after my Sera–Tec days asked me if I ever used heroin. Sera–Tec was a temporary fix all right, one that only provided enough money for more bread, peanut butter and Kool-Aid.

Despite these acts of generosity and my acts of desperation, I knew that I’d probably starve before the semester was over. I had less than ten dollars to work with after the first week in November. I went to Thackeray Hall to register for classes for next semester. While there, it occurred to me to go upstairs to see one of the financial aid counselors, an older Black woman who’d been really nice to me while working through my bill issues earlier in the semester. I told her in detail what was going on. “You need to talk to Ron,” she said, referring to Ron Slater, the university ombudsman, the person who normally resided over tuition payment issues. So there I was the next day, explaining to the ombudsman my situation. “We’ll take care of this, we’ll find you some extra money. Just hang in there for a few days.” He actually offered me money right out of his wallet. “No thanks, I’ll be all right,” I said, my voice starting to crack because I was so grateful that anyone cared enough to help me through my dire straits. I somehow found a way not to cry right there on the spot.

The week before Thanksgiving, I went to check in with Beverly, the financial aid person I’d seen earlier. “I’ve got good news for you, but you’ll have to wait a few days.” Through the ombudsman, the university had recalculated my financial aid package, increasing my Pell to the maximum amount allowed, and adding the federal SEOG grant (Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants) to my aid menu. Both gave me an extra $800 to work with. After that weekend, one where Regis’ potatoes became a part of my diet, I bummed five dollars off of one of my classmates from General Writing. The next day I got my check from the ombudsman. “I’m so glad to have been of help. It’s part of my job. I just wish you’d come to me earlier,” Ron said. Hearing that did get me to tear up. I was in the spirit of the season already. It was two days before Thanksgiving. I spent that holiday at Melissa C.’s house with her and her father, an ailing contractor in his early-sixties. It was the most thankful holiday I’d ever experienced.

It was the first of five straight Thanksgivings either spent with friends and their families or by myself, but all in which I was thankful for what I had while striving for something better. It seems like it’s been a lifetime since those naive and cynical days, where I didn’t trust anyone in my life. The bout with homelessness and the financial straits that followed changed my life in ways that I notice even today. Even with the years of working long hours and fighting for my career as a writer, I realize that I wouldn’t be here or on this blog doing any of what I’m able to do today without the kindness of strangers and friends, the ability to divorce myself from my past or the sense that God had a purpose for me, a reason for living and being. Even after nearly two decades, I have this and so much else to be thankful for. Happy Thanksgiving!

Well I did it. I tendered my resignation for my job of nearly four and to my organization of nearly seven years, effective in early February. It was a tough decision, even given all of my reasonable reasons for making a job and career change. I’m happy that I made the move. More importantly, I’m happier and looking forward to the next phase of my life and career.

The days after handing my resignation to my boss and explaining it to her have been filled mostly with relief tinged by a bit of sadness. After all, I like my supervisor and most of the folks I’ve worked with over the past four or seven years. And while I believe that my decision to resign was the right one, my doubts still linger about the consequences of leaving a job — however unstable the job and funding situation was and is — without another position already lined up. It seems weird to step out on faith — in God, myself, my wife and family — without calculating every conceivable angle for staying or going ahead of time.

But besides all of the things I have in my favor, the lessons I’ve learned from Boy At The Window are important ones for the road that lies ahead. I’m the same person who witnessed my mother getting beat up and knocked unconscious by my now ex-stepfather twenty-five years ago. The same human being who stepped in and took a summer’s worth of abuse from my stepfather in ’82, who found himself without a serious friend for years, who contemplated suicide at the age of fourteen. I’m certainly the same person who spent five days on the brink of dropping out of college, five days homeless on a major college campus wondering if I’d ever have any hope of having a future.

I’ve seen and been involved in so many things that I’ve had to overcome to get to this point in my life — including unemployment and underemployment — that I have little doubt that everything I’m searching for will actually happen. Including the success I desire as a writer. Yet the move to close one chapter in my life while opening another one has produced moments of anxiousness, of unfocused energy where I can do everything and nothing at the same time. It’s strange, really, almost exhilarating how this decision of mine has begun to affect my view of myself and my life of late.

But I know that none of this matters if I don’t find my footing as a successful writer and teacher in the foreseeable future. I know that there are things more important in life than paying rent or a mortgage, than the obvious accouterments of success. At the same time I understand that having some sense of financial security and independence can make the other parts of my life that much easier to enjoy and pursue. I want to be happy, to enjoy success and to cherish all of the people, places and things that are near and dear to me. If Boy At The Window has been about anything, it’s been about knowing that life is too precious to spend our time living in fear and despair, without trust and with little hope. That’s what this move to take more control over my life is about, to imbue all I am with a life of meaning and purpose that accounts for financial need, career success and personal happiness.