Numerical Order

At 5:42 a.m. on Saturday, Dec. 6, 2003, as my father stood at the stove making oatmeal, the pedometer clipped to his belt reported that he’d walked 34 steps, or .016 miles. Later that morning, after he’d done 180 sit-ups and 25 push-ups, my father and I drove 136.8 miles from suburban Detroit to Central Michigan University in Mt. Pleasant so that I could participate in a halftime ceremony honoring the Legends of the Games at the Michigan High School Athletic Assn. girls basketball finals the next day. I’d flown into Detroit from my home in Los Angeles on the red-eye the morning before, receiving 1,979 United frequent-flier miles for my effort. I looked at my watch as I drank coffee at the kitchen table and studied my father: 2:42 a.m. I was still on PST.

Thirty years earlier, on Dec. 15, 1973, my alma mater, Detroit Dominican High School, won the first state Class A Girls Basketball Championship in Michigan, beating Grand Rapids Christian 70-43. The team repeated as champions one year later with a 59-58 win over Farmington Our Lady of Mercy. I, a reliable bench warmer on both the 1973 and 1974 championship teams, was, technically, a Legend.

The miles, the dates, the scores--these are facts. Another fact, which you’ll have to take my word for: My father sat in the bleachers and watched every game, home and away, during both the 1973 and 1974 seasons.

*

About 10 months before we took this legendary trip, my father had a series of “little strokes.” That’s what my mother labeled them in the e-mail she sent me and my sisters. I called my father immediately after receiving it, and we had a conversation that went, in part, like this:

Me: But what is the technical term for what happened to you, Dad?

Him: I don’t know, honey.

Me: What does the doctor recommend?

Him: I don’t know, honey.

Me: But, Dad, what is the likelihood that you’ll have more of these incidents? How much have they affected you and your abilities?

Him (unconcerned): I don’t know, honey.

Me (frustrated): Geez, Dad, do you think you’re having a little stroke right now?

My father--and this is one reason I love the guy--laughed.

So this is not only a story of basketball and the relatively benign rupture or obstruction of an artery, but also a story of memory and what we use to fill the holes in it. I think my father uses numbers. It seems I do too.

*

When we arrived in Mt. Pleasant at 1:20 p.m., my father stepped out of the car, checked his pedometer and announced that he’d walked 3,292 steps, or 1.6 miles, so far that day. “That’s not so much, Dad,” I said, knowing he likes to log at least 12,000 steps, or 5.7 miles, by day’s end.

“What the hell,” he said. “I was riding in a car all morning. How many steps do you get out of that?”

A few days before I flew out for the ceremony and the trip with my dad, Detroit News sports reporter Heather Burns called me at my home in Los Angeles. She was writing a story about the upcoming event. She’d already talked to my sister, a sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times who had also played basketball at DHS, and heard some lofty ideas about women and leadership and Title IX, all things I believe in too. My conversation with Burns was a little different. It went like this:

Her: I’ll concentrate on the ’74 game because it was such a close one.

Me: It was?

Her: One point.

Me: Wow, who’d we play?

Her: Your archrivals ... [she paused, waiting for me to avow my hatred for them] ... Mercy.

Me: Really?

Back to the things I can count: Fourteen former teammates, coaches and student managers showed up for the Legends ceremony; six wore letter sweaters; the drive from Detroit to Mt. Pleasant took 194 minutes, including a stop in St. Louis (motto: “We’re the middle of the mitten”); I shot 11 pictures on an $8.99 Fujifilm disposable camera; before we returned to Detroit on Sunday morning, my father and I drove 5.2 miles to the Soaring Eagle Casino, where we played quarter slots for 23 minutes; I lost $50; he won $14.25 (he kept a running tally and knew with every spin how much he was up or down); my father takes between 2,106 and 2,122 steps per mile.

*

Numbers, of course, rarely tell the whole story.

After the halftime Legends ceremony, my father and I sat with my former teammates in the bleachers, about two-thirds of the way up from the court, and continued watching the Ishpeming Westwood Patriots battle the Michigan Center Cardinals. The gym was packed with fans. It was loud. It was warm. It was getting to my father--he had his fingers in his ears and his eyes were closed. At the end of the third quarter, I suggested we leave. He heard me.

I made my way down the bleachers, picking and choosing footholds carefully, nudging aside fans’ backpacks and jackets and legs, clearing the way and going slowly so my father could easily follow. This, it turns out, was not enough. I reached the floor and looked up to see him still a half-dozen rows away. He is a sturdy, barrel-chested man, and this, no doubt, added to the alarm of the people he lurched past. One older woman looked at me and shook her head at my foolishness in taking this route when another, less direct one, would have given my father a railing to hold. I felt sheepish.

And worried. My father was two rows of bleachers away when I saw him wobble. When I reached up, he grabbed my arm and put his weight on it. It took great effort to stand firm. For about 2.5 seconds we both fought to stay upright, and then I broke the silence.

“How many rows did we climb down, Dad?”

“Oh hell, honey, I didn’t count.”

We leaned on each other for an extra beat, finding something more reliable than numbers.