On one bright summer afternoon, my mother had taken me to my basketball tryouts for a junior high team. When we arrived, I started to talk to the coaches about their game plans and asked each of my team members their names. I noticed that I was the smallest person there. That’s when I realized what I was getting myself into. That’s when I knew I would have to push myself harder than most of the people on the team. A few days after, I started my first day at practice. I was off to a good start. I ran the hardest and shot the quickest layups in our warm ups. I thought I could do it all, that is, until I went for a shot and my teammate blocked it. Her foot tripped mine and I fell on the harsh, green carpet feeling defeated. My mother was driving our large, silver truck that even she could hardly see over, to take me to visit my grandmother who lives a few hours away. As we pulled up to her house, I noticed my grandmother’s bright peach paint was chipping off of the old looking house and her garden that surrounded her red bricked steps was withered. To let things become unlovely was not my grandmother’s common grounds. We entered her house and saw her lying on the bed with oxygen hooked up to her nose and a nurse beside her. I felt uncomfortable with the smell of a hospital inside her room. The nurse said she had cancer and wanted to control the cancer from her own house. A few weeks had passed since I had saw my grandmother, so there I was again, on my way to see her. When I entered her house this time it was different, It smelled like fresh baked rolls with cinnamon and she was standing there in her doorway to hug me. She had heard about my incident at basketball practice and said “It’s better to try and fail, than to fail and stay a failure.” I paused for a moment and then hugged her again. She told me that she would
