Jane Gross

She stood beneath the basket, crouching expectantly. Her teammates rotated counterclockwise around the key, passing the ball back and forth, then fired it in to her and she laid it up. Down at the other end of the court she boxed out the opposing center, spun around for the rebound and loped back to her basket. Crouching again, she squinted out toward the foul line as a teammate put up a soft, arching set shot.

My fourth ceramics class began and ended calamitously, despite high expectations and a building confidence. Working at the wheel, where I’d handily “thrown” a pot on my first try weeks before, my task was to wedge the clay to remove air and inconsistency, knead it into balls the size of oranges, slam them one at a time on the bull’s-eye of the wheel, and then hit the accelerator.

The sound drifts over to our bedroom like clockwork. Every night the piano plays a jaunty tune next door. It is usually the piano’s keys dancing in turn, but sometimes it is a record from the ’50s, a swaying, big-band sort of music that somehow brings our little corner of the neighborhood back several decades to when these homes were built, and a marriage was just beginning. Time rewinds and restarts with each change in key. I stop and sit each time, pulled to the window.