The lost child (or reflections on parenting)

A man lost his son at basketball practice on Saturday morning.
We were a crowd of parents sitting on the bleachers of an indoor gymnasium, the floor brightly marked out into basketball courts. The children had finished running around and shooting baskets and were gathered around the edges of the court waiting for the practice to begin.
We were a mixed crowd. There were parents who arrived early (I arrived early, I always arrive early out of fear of being late) and spent time playing with their children. Some ran out onto the basketball courts, took hold of a ball, and started to throw it and bounce it around with their child.
(There is a terminology for basketball which I don't yet know and a way of controlling the ball which escapes me completely. I watched four year old children walking and running around the court with the ball bouncing along next to them like a well trained gundog. Later, in the privacy of our local tiny playpark at dusk with only a few dog walkers nearby, I experimented and Maya's ball bounced away like a badly behaved puppy. Maya assures me that I just need a bit of practice... Iola assures me that I need a lot of practice!).
Other parents appeared only moments before the coach told the children to sit down. These parents were armed with laptops, smart phones, papers and books, surreptitiously sneaking take-out coffees and bags of donuts past the No Eating signs, complaining about their children's weekend schedules.
"Yeah," I overhear one dad saying, "She's had to come in her soccer shirt too because we're going straight to soccer and then she's got violin this afternoon and a playdate at 3.30." He looked exhausted, his daughter more so.
And there were parents who looked as though they should have been wearing L plates. I might be unable to bounce a basketball but I can, after nearly a decade of practice, get my children out of their coats without looking flustered. Not all parents are as experienced. The father who lost his child wore an air of bewilderment and realised, just as the coach blew her whistle to start the morning's training, that he couldn't see his son.
"Johnny?" he called from the side of the court, his head turning to and fro as he tried to scan the faces of 142 children. "Johnny?"
The children sat in a single row, cross-legged on the floor. They were silent. No children moved. No balls moved. (Note to self: how does the coach do this?)
The man ran onto the court. He ran like a dad, arms impeded by the coats and rucksacks that he was carrying, legs flailing. At the start, we parents smiled indulgently - kids, eh, never where you want them to be when you need them to be there. And then a ripple of anxiety began to move through the bleachers. People stopped reading their papers and books and text messages. - Has he lost his child? Is it a boy or a girl? Do we know how old he is? Has he told the front desk?
The man still ran around the court, his voice rising in panic. Then he ran out of the doors towards the front of the building, still calling his son's name. He ran back onto the courts. The other coaches talked to him and left the gymnasium, office staff appeared and disappeared. The children continued to sit in silence. The dad ran around the court again and the parents talked in increasingly hushed voices. There was a palpable sense of rising panic.
And then the dad saw Johnny, sitting very quietly two children away from Iola. He had been there all the time and he had not said a word. His father had simply not seen him.
"If that were my kid, I'd whup his ass," said the man behind me.
Johnny's dad ran over to his son, relief etched on his face.
The woman next to me took a mouthful of coffee and started to chuckle. "Pickney been there all long and not say anything? Yuh need to tell him man."
The dad hugged his son to him. The son didn't seem to speak and continued sitting with his eyes on the coach.
"The dad didn't see him? Sitting right there. Should have gone through the faces one by one by one until he had seen his son wasn't there. He didn't look hard enough." Another voice chimed in.
The dad left the court and the coach began to speak to the children. We were here to watch the children playing basketball but you could sense that the crowd were enjoying this entertainment: a shared moment of relief after the rising panic. An officious looking man in a suit arrived and we watched the dad explaining what had happened to him, his arm flapping vaguely towards his son and his face going slightly pink. The other coaches reappeared, and the dad walked over to them and blushed slightly more. The woman next to me, taking her donut out of the Dunkin' Donuts bag, began a loud conversation with the man behind us, discussing parenting styles and stating, in no uncertain terms, exactly what she would have done if the boy had been her own. And then the crowd settled back down to their morning's parenting. An assortment of faces focused back onto their phone screens  and laptops and papers; groups of parents began to chat in quiet voices, and the rest of us watched as the balls and the children, all of the children, bounced around the court.