Dear Los Angeles,We heard. We’re so sorry. We’ve been there — twice.I’ve been reading your sentiments online. Half of you are mourning a maestro; the other half are muttering “good riddance.” We never had your ambivalence. In Cleveland, we worship him.You had eight years and a title in a bubble. We had 11 years, a betrayal, a homecoming and a parade. I’m not gloating. I’m telling you the grief is survivable, and hope is damn near impossible to kill.I get it. You knew it was his MO to leave, but it still hurts. I know the stages: the resentment, the relief, the forgiveness — and the strange discovery that you don’t find out what LeBron James meant to your city until he’s gone. We burned jerseys in 2010. You’ll probably just post on social media. Either way, it passes.Then, last weekend, came the viral photo: LeBron back in Akron with his old high school teammates — one of whom, Brandon Weems, now happens to work in the Cavaliers’ front office. To you, that photo may have read as a jilting in progress. To us, it brought a familiar swell of hope. It’s irrational to expect that maybe this time it will be different, and yet I do. I can’t help myself.The poet Emily Dickinson wrote that hope is the thing with feathers, a small bird perched in the soul. Ours is 6-foot-9 and wears a size 15 shoe. I know there are more important things to worry about — democracy, the climate, your uncle’s weak heart. And yet I’m giddy to be distracted by the fact that LeBron has told the Lakers he won’t be back, and that his agent, Rich Paul, another Clevelander, says Cleveland is in the running to become his new old home team.This would be LeBron’s third stint with the Cleveland Cavaliers, and three is a magic number. Three is what you count to when you hold hands with your best friend and jump into icy water.My son Adam cautions me to temper my expectations: “Mom, figure that he’ll go with the Warriors. Then you won’t be disappointed if he doesn’t come back to the Cavs.” The only reason I got interested in LeBron in the first place is Adam. He was 14 in 2002 and talked me into the 45-minute drive to Akron to see a game he considered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Seventeen-year-old LeBron James was being described as a basketball phenom. “Mom, actual NBA players go to his games. Just to watch him play.” This LeBron kid was “going to be the biggest basketball deal in the world.”So we went. GPS was not on a screen in our car, and our flip phones weren’t helpful, but we found our way to St. Vincent-St. Mary High School and watched LeBron lead his team to a 79-47 victory over the neighborhood high school team. The losing players, it seemed, could not have been more thrilled to be on a court with LeBron.Adam had to explain a lot about what was going on. He was more patient than I would have expected him to be, and some 24 years later, he’s still my go-to source for explanations about the game and its players. But I caught the LeBron bug at that game (and the basketball bug along with it) and haven’t lost it since.The teammates in that photo are the boys from that gym, grown now and still at his side. The man has a streak of loyalty — but only LeBron knows to whom it’s owed and when it’s the driving force behind his moves.While Adam might have a thing or two to teach me about basketball, I have something to teach him about hope. Los Angeles, you’ll learn this too. Hope isn’t something to suppress just because disappointment may be on the horizon. Hope is something to nurture and cherish. The dream of one more championship parade, on one of the dozen perfect-weather days Cleveland is allotted each year, lifts my spirits no matter how remote the possibility.Whether or not LeBron comes home, hope has already done its work. My ever-rational son, who cautioned me to brace for LeBron to choose the Warriors, texted me the other day: The insiders are calling Cleveland the team to beat.Adam and I are counting to three.Lori Wald is a mindfulness meditation coach in the Cleveland area and writes the Substack “Tuesdays With Lori.”
