Old Songs in a New Cafe by Robert James Waller

retirement. Will we go? Yes, but
     it will cost $200. He doesn’t care what it costs. (I curse my inexperience.)
    Small town in north Indiana. April 1968. On the train with journalists, TV crews, and lots of other people in nice suits just
     running around. We are instructed to report to the last car, the Kennedy car. Bobby, Ethel, kids, dog. They need publicity
     shots. Sixteen (I counted) cameras from around the world zoom in on the Senator, Wayne, and me—“Listen to the jingle, the
     rumble and the roar…”
    First stop. Secret Service types lead us onto the back platform, guns visible when they turn just right. Bobby and Ethel follow
     them, then us. The Senator holds the mike for me. “… as she climbs along the woodlands, through the hills and by the shore.”
     Thousands of people, screaming, holding up signs for and against the Kennedy effort, pushing to get close to the platform.
     Men with cameras on their shoulders are fighting the crowd and trying to get a foothold on the slippery rails.
    We go on, from town to town. The scene repeats itself. Guns, crowds surging, Bobby talking in his persuasive way about problems
     and people. He holds the mike for me as we pull away. “Ridin’ along in safety on the Wabash CannonbalL”
    Back in Iowa, I receive the check from Kennedy campaign headquarters the morning he is shot. Strange. Probabilities. I somberly
     walk to the bank and cash it. Strange.
    Bobby Kennedy is dead, Charles Kuralt is still on the road, and Wayne Schuman doesn’t play anymore. I get out the old Martin
     guitar, late in the day, and once in a while 1 quietly sing, “Listen to the jingle…” Once in a while.

Jump Shots
    ______________________________________
    I n a Dakota February, the wind never rests. Neither do the basketball fans. Both are howling as I bring the ball upcourt in
     the North Dakota State University fieldhouse. Old patterns before me. Stewart shouting instructions from the sideline. Holbrook
     loping ahead and to the right. Spoden, our ail-American center, struggling for position in the lane. Head fake left, and the
     man guarding me leans too far. Dribble right. Double screen by Holbrook and McCool. Sweat and noise, smell of popcorn. See
     it in slow motion now. Behind the screen into the air, ball over my head, left hand cradling it, right hand pushing it, slow
     backward spin as it launches. Gentle arc…
    The ball just clears the telephone wire and bounces off the rim of the basket as I land on hard-packed dirt in the silence
     of an Iowa summer evening. Miles from the wind, years before the Dakotas. Bored with school and small-town life at thirteen,
     I have decided to become a basketball player. Absurd. Five feet two inches tall, 110 pounds.
    I am untroubled by the impossibility of it all. Day after day, night after night in the weak glow of the back porch light,
     the ball goes up. One hundred more shots, and I’ll quit. Maybe 200. Can’t stop until I have five straight from twenty feet.
    Freshman year. I try out for the high school team, which is just not done by freshmen. Freshmen are supposed to play on the
     junior high team. That’s understood. I take a pounding, mentally and physically, from the upperclassmen. Yet, into the evenings,
     wearing gloves in late autumn, I work jump shots around the telephone wire. Merlin, the school janitor, ignores the rules
     and lets me in the gym at 7 A.M . on Saturdays. I shoot baskets all day, with a short break for lunch.
    The Big Day. Twelve will be selected to suit up for the games. I feel that I have a chance. I have hustled and listened and
     learned. But about twenty people are trying to make the team, a lot of them are seniors, and there is the whole question of
     whether a freshman even ought to be out there. At the end of practice, the coach has us informally shoot baskets while he
     walks the gym with a list. Studying it, he begins to call out names, slowly, one every minute or so: “Mehmen” …“Clark”…