A culture non-war

 Something fairly unremarkable happened a few days back here in the Fort -- and when I say "unremarkable" it's because this is Indiana, and only if you're not from here would you regard it otherwise.

("Well, THAT makes sense," you're saying now)

Allow me to explain.

See, what happened was, a group of Amish showed up at Reservoir Park, long a mecca of summer hoops in Fort Wayne's inner city. There were both men and women, and some of the men rolled up their sleeves and cycled into the games, their blue work shirts and long dark pants and suspenders a stark contrast to the tanks and shorts of the mostly African-American men with whom they shared the court.

The court, and our universal Indiana language: Basketball.

Crossovers. Back cuts. Give-and-go's. Stepback Js and box-outs and make-it-take-it and "Ball! Ball!", and of course that timeless challenge: "We got next." 

You live in Indiana, all that's in your blood the second you bust out of the womb.

You live in Indiana, you've played on that court at Reservoir Park, or on a thousand courts just like it. You've played in some barn loft where you don't dare chase a ball out of bounds, because it's a 15-foot drop to concrete and there's a trip to the ER in your future if you do. 

You've played, finally, in a driveway in the dead of winter -- bundled up in four sweatshirts, your breath smoke-signaling out in icy puffs, your jumpshots coming off oddly muffled by your gloved hands.

And so, yeah, when I say it's unremarkable that a bunch of Amish men would be hooping with a bunch of black men in the inner city on a summer evening, I say it as a native Hoosier who gets in his bones that basketball is a culture unto itself here. And that it therefore knits together all other cultures.

Now, I'm no sociologist, but I do know a few things. I know we live in a time in America when the loudest voices seem to be the craziest and most extreme. I know a nation that is by its very nature tribal has surrendered, as it periodically does, to the worst and most lunatic instincts of that nature. 

But you know what?

I also know there is an overarching commonality to the American experience, and that it's in particularly fissured times that we most need to cling to our knit-together places. And that's true even if that place is just a patch of inner-city asphalt on a summer evening in Indiana, alive with the rhythms of our Indiana game.

Culture wars, we've got in abundance. Culture non-wars -- cultural touchstones -- we could surely use more of.

So here's the ball, America. You got next.