The boy switches the bat into his left hand, picks up the ball with his right, and throws it back to Uncle Zeno. The uncles are singing to the boy. He has never heard anything so beautiful. He does not want it to stop. Part of the challenge I've set myself with this book is to use the simplest possible lines to tell a complex story, to have the story say things without saying them.
Good stories live between the lines, and make something happen up above the page.
In church, the choir moves along the melody, but then the soprano comes in, singing the descant, high above the choir. The melody is wonderful, but high up above, that's where something beautiful is happening. Jim is a man who just showed up in my head one day. So I wrote a story about him. He came back again a few months later.