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Thing | Sep 17 2002

There was once a basketball player named Jeff Hornacek who was ugly but a very good shooter. Whenever he shot free throws, he would bounce the ball a certain number of times—the same number of times each time—and then he would rub his cheek with his right hand. This gesture was a signal to his kids that he loved them.

If you didn’t know this, you may have thought the gesture unconscious. A man looks at something, focusing all his attention on it, trying, as men do, to reduce the world to just this thing and him, and then without thinking he raises his hand to his face and slowly strokes his cheek a single time, as though to wipe something away, or more likely as an accompaniment to his thoughts, which are focused on the thing before him.

I’ve been thinking about this and wanting to find a symbol, a word, a gesture, anything that might stand in the place of the things not said. It would be for you, and it would mean a thing that only you would understand. To everyone else I would appear to be a man, the same as always, the same man as always, absently rubbing his cheek.