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A Boy, a Man. And All Those Nutbars In Between.

Posted by :James Howden On : August 19, 2026
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Category: At First Glance

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It’s never really about basketball.

These boys were neither cute, rambunctious children, nor young men launching themselves into the orbit of their adult lives. Not quite yet: they were “my guys”, a coupla dozen nutbars (he fondly called them) entering grades 8 to 10, students working on their basketball skills in anticipation of a new academic year and school team tryouts. It was August 14. It was our last of 23 training sessions. There were Freezie pops for everybody, and a chocolate bar (or two) for the guys who showed up the most and weren’t afraid to be “try-hards”. (Try-hards. In the joy-killing cynicism of youth basketball “culture”, this is a term of dismissal and a weird sort of shame.) I preached courage all summer. And concentration. And yes, competitiveness, the willingness to rise to the challenges presented by other players, by a keen and pushy coach (me), and by the ever-green imperative to improve on our previous best selves.

So. Good last session. We tried hard. I was glad to be finished. Eleven more days until school begins. But only two boys of that final day’s 20 thanked me for the summer’s (volunteer) work. Empty Freezie pops were left on the gym floor. Ideal outcomes were unachieved. Irritating realities intruded. Mainly, I wanted the gym cleared and the equipment stored and the boys gone. The coach was weary, and fighting off the typical post-feverish-engagement voices: shoot, I thought we’d get more done and wish I’d seen more of *those* two but also there *was* massive improvement, admit it and don’t forget that C is really starting to lead…

The gym was finally quiet when Amalia’s text came. WHAT? That little boy I had loved was suddenly gone? That 20-year-old man I was longing to meet in his adult flowering? Won’t ever happen. That gorgeous family — an Italian sweetheart and his lovely American wife and those three delightful little boys – the one that I loved to meet whenever our ex-pat group in Dalian (China) could get together? It is devastated now.

It’s less than two weeks since we reunited with Piero and Tannaz at a large conference in my home city, a dozen years after leaving Dalian. Our periodic connection during our shared years in China was especially sweet for me; I had been father to a three-boy family, a second try-hard at marriage had brought along a fourth son, so I was helplessly smitten by Jian and his littler brothers. Tannaz and Piero brought us up to speed about their boys, on a convention centre escalator and in between conference sessions. Jian was now 20, a lean and handsome extension of the bright-eyed 6- to 8-year old tornado I had known back then and there. He was now a college kid, spending a few weeks at Green Acre Bahá’í  School, deepening his knowledge and commitment in summer sessions of the Institute for Studies in Global Prosperity. (ISGP is a phenomenally impactful institution, dedicated to training young people to transform their worlds.) I had a hundred questions for him, which would have been summed up in one basic query: Who are you NOW, young fella? 

Amalia’s text was a sudden lament. There had been a drowning. The Piscataqua River, near Green Acre, empties into the Atlantic. A young man, our dear Jian, full of energy, intelligence, deep commitment and enormous potential (and so handsome, and how could he have been otherwise considering the parents who had raised him?), had suddenly leapt from the worldly stage he seemed destined to stride with grace and purpose, with joys and usefulness.

I had been relieved to have the gym to myself for a few minutes before I got on with my day. Now, I wanted to call my players back. I wanted to tell them about Jian Grant Morano, what a sweet small boy he’d been and the grief and loneliness I felt about a young man I would never know. My loss is nothing against the earthquake of a father, a mother, two younger brothers and the tide of people who knew and loved this family. I wanted to warn adolescent boys: nothing is guaranteed, life is sudden, don’t waste a second, all those earnest cautions that I would not have heeded at their age.

Prayer helps. I am led to believe that it can stir distant hearts, even those souls that have passed on. What I know is that it helps me in ways that my oh-so-strained understanding cannot. So does the Old Testament, specifically the blunt comfort of Ecclesiastes 9. The voice in that book, the Teacher, has been telling us for millennia that our limited views of human justice are inadequate for the scope of the life of humanity, and that a Creator infinitely beyond our comprehension should not be judged by our petty standards. Death comes to all:

For I considered all this in my heart, so that I could declare it all: that the righteous and the wise and their works are in the hand of God….All things come alike to all:…(Ecclesiastes 9:1-2)

In Chapter 8, the Teacher had famously advised his hearers that “there is nothing better under the sun than to eat and to drink and to be merry“. Similar encouragement follows later in the ninth chapter, which I was coming to know when I was the age Jian was, back when we were together in Dalian, twelve and more years ago:

Live joyfully with the wife whom you love all the days of your vain life which He has given you under the sun, all your days of vanity; for that is your portion in life, and in the labor which you perform under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might;…I returned and saw under the sun that—

The race is not to the swift,
Nor the battle to the strong,
Nor bread to the wise,
Nor riches to men of understanding,
Nor favor to men of skill;
But time and chance happen to them all… (Ecclesiastes 9:9-11)

(Sigh. Nobody gets to marry Jian.) However, for those who believe in what we blithely call the “hereafter” — I count myself among them, though I can’t say I’m very good at it — there are comforts beyond Ecclesiastes. For example, the New Testament’s vision of the soul’s continued existence (“in my Father’s house are many mansions”) is confirmed and amplified in the Bahá’í teachings, which at one point compare the untimely death of a young one to the actions of a “kind gardener” who transfers a tender plant to a wider and lovelier place. Furthermore, a treasured prayer of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has been on my mind and tongue since I learned of Jian’s death, one in which we beg the Lord of the universe, on behalf of someone whose loss we grieve, to

…cause him to enter Thy glorious paradise, and perpetuate his existence in Thine exalted rose garden, that he may plunge into the sea of light in the world of mysteries. Verily, Thou art the Generous, the Powerful, the Forgiver and the Bestower.

But how do I make sense of this loss? I keep learning to pray, yes, and hope that perspective sets in. I also hope to keep hearing the Teacher, to do “whatever [my] hand finds to do” with all my might. I’ll try hard, and remind my nutbar ballers that there’s no shame in that! (Not ever.) And when I’m coaching or otherwise working with the youth I am so drawn to, I will look to Jian and his example. We all need help down here.

 

 

Trust Me, They’re Tired: Venezuela’s Pain, and the Emptiness of Cliché

Posted by :James Howden On : June 29, 2026
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Category: At First Glance

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[3-minute read]

Martin Amis wrote a fine book called The War Against Cliché. He’s mainly known as a novelist, though for too long he was just “Kingsley Amis’s bad-boy son”. That cliché, at least, had been retired decades before Sir Martin’s long and accomplished life ended in 2024. But why would a collection of his essays have been titled as an all-out attack against familiar language? I couldn’t carry his pen-case, but I’m with Amis: “To idealise: all writing is a campaign against cliché…”

Listen: we have the expression “it’s a cliché for a reason” for a reason. Sometimes an old saying is a useful reminder or a profound comfort; my mother never wearied of gently saying, in the face of misfortune or gloom, it’s always darkest before the dawn (Thomas Fuller, 1650) and all things work together for good (Paul’s epistle to the Romans 8:28, about a millennium and a half earlier). And yes, whoever first said, about some sport or another, that “it’s a game of inches” knew what he was talking about. It expressed an evergreen truth about the games we watch and play. Still, the best jock commentators try to avoid saying it, or give a rueful shrug of apology when they do. Because it’s OLD. It’s TIRED.

But there’s more to Amis’s war, to every good writer’s battle against cliché, than simple fatigue or a wish to seem stylish. And it applies, to a less obvious but maybe even more essential degree, to all of us. It’s this: How can we know if we’re actually thinking if we merely recycle a set of phrases that we have heard from others? The creative writer (painter, film-maker, dancer) restlessly desires to make – even though there’s nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9, several centuries before St. Paul) – something novel, illuminating or (at the very least) interesting. Some describe poetry as the constant renovation, the organic renewal of language. Is that process merely about the quest for a fashionable phrase, some nifty bit of in-group vocabulary?

No.

There’s a crucial and mightier argument. If we’re not actually thinking, actively seeking understanding for ourselves, then we are subject to, in no particular order, empty-headed and derivative pop culture (bingo!), a heartless and bland societal conversation (John Ralston Saul’s “unconscious civilization”), endlessly persuasive Mad Men media urging us to Buy What They’re Selling! (now!), not to mention tyrant business monopolies and their pet politicians greasing the skids for autocracy. (I apologize. “Greasing the skids” is a cliché, though perhaps you’re young enough that it feels refreshing to you as an alternative to “paving the way”.) Thinking as I was about Martin Amis et sa guerre, I ran across a 15-year-old column from The Guardian lamenting, even back then, how decisively Mr. Amis had lost his War. (It’s rather British, but a lively rant against cliché.)

All of which leads me to this morning’s encounter with an online news digest from National Public Radio, an American treasure that is under attack. (Not by me, understand.) My bride and I have been touring Ontario, but our ten days of relatively news-free travel are over. I was having an oh shit re-entry into dismay, mostly at the fate of poor suffering Venezuela. For that country to endure monstrous natural disasters, on top of the human-made kind, feels like cruel and unusual punishment. (A cliché, yes. I’ll stand by this one.) From NPR: 

“The search for survivors continues nearly five days after two powerful earthquakes hit Venezuela. The official death toll is nearing 1,500, and thousands of people are still unaccounted for. Families and volunteers are tirelessly digging through collapsed buildings throughout the northern coast and in neighborhoods of Caracas, the country’s capital, in hopes of finding people alive.” (NPR’s second bit of “news we’re following”; Iran and the United States ceasing to cease fire, surprise, was number one on June 29, 2026.)

It’s awful. And just to be foolishly clear, it’s not the journalistic blandness in general that has my Cliché Alert sounding on a sunny Monday morning. Yes, “search for survivors”, “death toll” and “unaccounted for” are over-taxed phrases, but this is not poetry. Readers want to get their information efficiently, and NPR points them towards more detailed accounts if they want them. No notes, no complaint. It’s just that I have grown chronically fatigued with the adverb “tirelessly”. Obituaries of any respectable professional or half-diligent labourer are almost never without it, but it’s not just the overuse and the lack of genuine thought. It’s the lie.

Don’t start my obituary yet, but I’ll ask in advance: Please don’t use “tirelessly” to describe my life’s work as a dad, or as a midnight grader of English assignments, or as a basketball coach addicted to “the grind”. I wish we could retire the word tirelessly, and for good. (“Indefatigable” is less shopworn, but has too many syllables and is equally untrue.) I was exhausted by all of that. I still am. Life at its best, for most of us, is still tiring.

But widen the scope. As they find themselves in an epic tale of tragedy and pain and heroism, too, I am unsettled by the mere thought of that South American aftermath. Consider that legion of unhappy souls, labouring desperately to find loved ones, neighbours and strangers in a deeply shaken Venezuela!

They’re tired as hell. And they’ll keep going. It’s human nature.