Fiction: Falling From the Garden Into Wonder

by William Sheldon and illustrations by Jason Cring, February 25, 2008

The Garden. Not the small plot outside the door tended with care to produce flowers or food. Nor the domain from which Adam and Eve fell. This garden was quite different. Square. Noisy. Situated in the midst of a bustling city. The most famous arena in the world, as hyped by the advertisements that followed us in. On Rangers and Knicks nights, filled with 15,000 screaming and passionate fans. But not this afternoon. This afternoon we could buy $15 tickets and make our way to sit only 10 rows back, with Cody’s coach and his friends in the seats they were holding for us near courtside.

I was uneasy, intimidated even. It’s not that I am unsophisticated; I am a management consultant, after all. I fly to engagements in a dozen cities. But this was New York, with my son, who I’m always too worried about and who was looking to me, for this one afternoon at least, for guidance through the melee of Penn Station, the push of 34th Street, the cacophonous, unfamiliar bombardment of our senses.

We were meeting his coach at the Garden—a man who Cody worked out with once a week and who coached the inner-city upstate team that Cody longed to play for. Coach Lawrence had invited him down to watch a high school basketball tournament, the best prep schools from three different states playing through the afternoon. Cody thought that by going he might have a better chance of making the team. I came because Cody had asked me to come.

But I was uneasy. I never take the train. I kept worrying that we’d take the wrong line, or that I’d lose our tickets or we’d miss our stop. I know this made no sense. I kept telling myself these were trivial, unwarranted fears, but it was the city and I was uncomfortable. I touched my hip pocket for the 10th time in an hour, reassuring myself that my wallet was there. Christ, what if I lost it? What if someone picked my pocket? No money, no credit cards, no ATM. Images of wandering the street asking for help from indifferent strangers and civil servants flitted across my mind. I found myself touching my wallet again, my keys in my front pocket. As if these rituals could protect my son from all the harm that might wander unseen into his life.

It seemed like some distant halcyon era when we had been close. Cody was the tough, funny, athletic boy whose soccer teams I had coached, showing him how to hit passes with his instep and take power shots, all the things I’d learned in my own brief soccer career. I’d watched tapes and read books to teach him strategies and technique and stood in the goal taking shots from him in the fading autumn darkness.