Jaycee Park is your typical suburban neighborhood park. There is a kid's playground set, a tennis court and a basketball court. A walking path encircling the main green space welcomes couples walking dogs and 8 year olds racing bicycles. The park is tucked away in a quiet neighborhood of West Des Moines, off of streets lined with shiny, sensible cars and immaculate lawns.
I'd gone to the park this Sunday early evening to work on my jumpshot. Mid-way through my routine, a small boy split off from his friends and asked if he could shoot with me. I ignored my initial selfish desire to retain the hoop all to myself and began feeding the ball to him as he began to shoot.
After a while, partly to pass the boredom, I struck up a conversation with him. In contemporary American society, being a grown man conversing with a small boy in a park presents a number of challenges. For example: I thought it better not to ask the question "So do you live around here?"
Instead, I inquired as to his age, guessing about five. As a high school swim teacher, I'd acquired an uncanny gift at correctly guessing childrens' ages, one that it seems can be lost rather quickly.
"Eight," he replied, shooting up another air ball. "But next year I'm going to be ten...I mean, nine."
He had an olive complexion and thick, curly brown hair that was styled in a semi-mohawk. I would have guessed Mediterranean, and to satiate my curiosity, decided to approach the question of ethnic extraction gently.
"How many languages do you speak?" I asked him, in English.
"Two," he answered immediately. "Arabic and Spanish!"
"Which one do you speak at home?" I responded, and gradually I learned that the boy was from Iraq, and that he'd been in America for two years, and that he preferred American food over Iraqi. When I asked if he was from Baghdad, he paused, slightly startled.
"How'd you know that?!" he exclaimed. "You know everything!"
Eventually, I grew tired of practicing my rebounding, and when my young friend told me that he was, in fact, a soccer player, I managed to send him racing off to the bespectacled teenage girl who'd just arrived at the park, no doubt hoping to work on her individual soccer skills. He scurried off immediately, and, in polite Midwestern fashion, she accepted his request to join her.
Minutes later, the boy's family approached the court. Two middle-aged women and a younger woman, all in hijabs, as well as their two husbands, and two more children. They asked to join me, and began to take turns shooting, amidst much warm laughter and Arabic commentary, interspersed with nouns like "left hand", "shoot" and "slam dunk." As they left, I asked how long they'd been in the US.
"Two months for them, but three years for me," said the middle aged lady with the best English (perhaps her nephew had confused the words 'year' and 'month'). I then tried to explain to them how I'd previously worked for an international development NGO that ran microfinance and water sanitation projects in their home country, with little success.
"Like a corporation?" the lady had asked, after we'd whittled down that it was not military.
"More like a charity," I offered, and the lady nodded without expression. I suppose I was hoping for a spark of recognition--perhaps even a dash of gratitude--but none was forthcoming, perhaps due to language, perhaps due to rightful ambivalence. But as the family walked over to join their fearless son's football game, I thought of how nice it must be for them, to live here in a quiet suburb of Des Moines, Iowa, where their sons play basketball with strangers without fear and the biggest safety threat appears to be farming accidents. They and I are both immigrants, both from foreign cultures, learning about life in a Midwestern town. And as vastly different as our origins and futures might be, I enjoyed the thought that these new neighbors and I were living out a small piece of the American dream together, at leisure in this quiet neighborhood park, against a gently fading summer dusk.
Pic courtesy of Remix Athletics - http://remixathletics.com/news/?p=1124 - via Google Images.
