Go Big AND Go Home

October Flash Lit #10:
​Go Big or Go Home

When I was 15, my family moved from Westchester, New York, to Marin County, California. It was a trail of old money to new money. In New York, my friends drove beater, ancient station wagons. In California, students would pull up to school in shiny new BMWs and Mercedes, arriving from their fantastical castle homes on tops of hills overlooking the San Francisco Bay. 

We rented an apartment.  

Despite what people might be led to believe about New York and its sports obsession, we didn't take them too seriously at my high school – or at least my friends and I didn't.  On the cross country team, my teammate and I would jog to the local Dunkin’ Donuts, have a smoke behind the building, and then scarf down a doughnut or a couple of doughnut holes, and then jog back. On the basketball team, my biggest claim to fame was scoring for the opposing team. It wasn’t pretty – but it was fun.   

When I moved to California, I didn’t know what to expect. I just knew that I wanted to play basketball, a source for friends in my former life. First up was a sleepaway basketball training camp with the girls' team in Lake Tahoe. I eagerly signed up and boarded the bus.

I lasted only a couple of days. The girls were catty and very exclusive and I was a miserable outsider. I didn't know how to tell a grown up that. 

So I just left. 

I somehow got myself to the local Greyhound station and I bought a ticket and boarded the bus home. 

This was decades before cell phones, so no one, not my parents, not the people at the camp, knew where I was. We stopped at a rest stop and I found a payphone and called my parents, dropping dimes in the coin slot. They weren't mad. Just disappointed I think. 
I could have stayed and made the five days. But I didn't.

​Instead, I decided to go big AND go home.