A true sports parent dies twice. There’s the death that awaits us all at the end of a long or short life, the result of illness, misadventure, fire, falling object, hydroplaning car, or derailing train. But there is also the death that comes in the midst of life, the purgatorial purposelessness that follows the final season on the sidelines or in the bleachers, when your sports kid hangs up their skates, cleats, or spikes after that last game.
Here they come, two by two, the classic cars of America. The 1970s muscle cars, the ’60s coupes, and the ’50s sedans—“kandy-kolored” (to borrow Tom Wolfe’s phrase) beauties that came off the line in the golden age before the catalytic converter, when rich black smoke pooled above the beach lot where the boys gathered.
In the summers of my youth, the rooms were always air-conditioned. This machine-cooled air came not from window units, which were a relic of the cities, but from central systems that chilled every inch of living space to an Alaskan 67 degrees. The air seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. It had no warm spots, no eddies, no pockets of humidity.