Practice 4-4: Editing Tense

Boys were playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it... The scraping and snapping of Keds on loose alley pebbles seemed to catapult their voices high in the moist March air blue above the wires. Rabbit Angstrom, came up the alley in a business suit, he stopped and watched, although he was twenty six and six three. So tall, he seemed like an unlikely rabbit, bit the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irises, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose as he stabbed a cigarette into his mouth, partially explaining his nickname, which was given to him when he too was a bot. He stood there thinking, the kids kept coming, they kept crowding you up.