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Jack Balas, 2025
I VOTE FOR BRUCE (#25-2844)
India ink on paper, 2 panels, 44x30 inches overall

Text:
I was supposed to be down in Florida right now, but instead I am out at the middle-school track in late dusk, having walked over while there was still a red cloud in the sky. Bruce White's memorial was a few hours ago, near Sarasota, and I'd bought a ticket and was all packed, but six hours before I would have left for the airport I had to cancel the trip. So I am sort of benched sitting on the bleachers, a basketball court behind me as I watch darkness settle over the mountains. The backboards arch over the asphalt, slabs of white glowing in the deep blue, their nets limp and empty as they wait for some championship game and victors who will scale each other's shoulders to reach up and cut them down, cart them off as trophies or souvenirs.
Further back is a line of pines, sticky limbs spreading shoulder to shoulder across the sky, their bigness, their mass like the mountains to the west, sensed even in the dark. They remind me of a story about Franklin Roosevelt, that on the day he died in 1945 a huge oak, the largest on his property in upstate New York, collapsed on a clear, windless day, came crashing to the ground.
Here some kid has left a basketball on the ground and I pick it up, this orange orb, and launch it towards the net. There's that soft sound, and I am carried home on some big shoulders, scissors poised, as I sense another orange orb about to rise in the east.
I vote for Bruce every day.