anchored.
J.J. was a skinny kid who moved to our neighborhood when I was in middle school. He was my age, but a lot shorter than me (most of the boys were). More importantly, he played basketball in his driveway. For a few glorious summers, there were enough kids in my neighborhood to have big games of basketball, dodge ball, and hide-and-seek. So one afternoon I took my basketball over to J.J.'s house and rang the doorbell. "A bunch of us are playing basketball at the end of the street. Wanna play?" After that he became a regular in our pick-up games, which we played most nights in the summer and every weekend. We didn't know each other very well, as we went to different schools, but my parents liked his parents, he was nice, and really good at basketball. Perfect qualities for a neighborhood kid. And because he was so much shorter than me, I never had a crush on him. When we reached high school, J.J. moved back to Milwaukee to live with his biological father, and I di...