shellytown

Brooklyn is a strangely good place to be a Francophile. A few weeks ago, we celebrated Bastille Day at a street fair in our neighborhood. Why not?

How great that over 200 years ago, in 1789, the angry citizens of Paris got it together long enough to take over the government’s artillery and pulled something off that it seems no modern citizenry would ever dare – a true class-based revolution. And how great that we get to celebrate it here, in Brooklyn?

If there were going to be a class-based revolution in the U.S. (our own effort in 1776 to dislodge the colonies from the British was hardly a people’s revolution – it was all about new wealth wanting out from under the old), why couldn’t it start here? Not that many of our drunken neighbors on Smith St. that afternoon were thinking about overthrowing the ruling class – many of them were probably members of it, and most of the rest were thoroughly of the bourgeoisie. But on any given day in the heart of this borough, if you walk around downtown, the downtrodden are in abundance. Pushed right up next to one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city – Brooklyn Heights (median apartment price in 2006 = over $3 million) – is a place where a lot of people look like they’re struggling even to walk down the street.

As we plan a trip to Paris for Thanksgiving – my birthday, my first time to go to Europe, my dream come true to visit France – I think of the irony. Paris for me is a symbol of resistance and true revolution as much as it seems a magical place of art and beauty, and we are spending years’ worth of savings to get there for one week. That we can do that makes me feel bad and excited all at the same time. And like the rest of us walking around downtown Brooklyn every day, which of those two emotions I’ll choose almost answers the question of why nothing like Bastille Day may ever happen again.

Out hitting the little yellow ball this morning at the courts on Columbia Street, with downtown Manhattan as our backdrop, the lost industry of Brooklyn’s crumbled waterfront just yards away, the familiar resistance to the constraints this city imposes took hold.

Other places, you don’t have to pay $100 a year to play for one hour at a time…you just walk on any court you can find. Some of those courts in my life were really nice: the 10 pack of never-full green and red courts we spent so much time on at Montclair State; the single “secret court” always shaded by the tall trees in a greenbelt off Friendly Ave. in Greensboro; the perfectly maintained hard courts in the curvy-streeted and live-oaked neighborhood of my mom and stepdad’s house in Dallas.

But here, doing something like liking tennis requires a lot of effort. Go get and pay for a permit, sign up hours or even days ahead of time for one-hour slots, hope it doesn’t rain, deal with people who don’t have permits but insist on bringing their kids and scooters and skateboards onto the courts…Such a different thing, often a circus. But this morning, instead of lamenting the difference, something clicked.

Living in a place like New York with its 8.2 million people in 304 square miles brings the idea of rules to the forefront: If we couldn’t all agree to live by some simple guidelines, it would never work. And despite the obvious outliers (jerks who push onto trains before you can get off; loud cell-phone discussers of intimate personal details in public; rude pushers of SUV-sized baby strollers into closet-sized bodegas; tennis freeloaders with no permits), we somehow live together. We carved out our legitimate hour on that court this morning, and no one could come and take it away.

Police choppers have been frequenting our neighborhood of late. Invading the air space directly above our alley, they are insistent in their tight, circling searches for some criminal element who they believe has fled, no doubt, into a crevice they’ll eventually see. Their searchlights illuminate our balcony and the church’s red brick wall behind us, flashing into the bedroom, disturbing the dogs.

A neighbor I have never seen before comes outside into his back courtyard while the big black bird goes on circling overhead on a recent evening. Over and over, the hum, fat chop of the blades, the whine of the engine Dopplering back and forth across the trench of blue night above us. We’d both like to know what the problem is…But he doesn’t look over at me, and I don’t call out or wave.

We both stand silently, enduring the invasion, wanting to share it but unable – me and the dogs in our tiny second-story “backyard,” he in his ivy-covered patio – until he turns and walks slowly up the stairs and back into his own helicopterless life.

Our first day of the last season of Shea Stadium was last weekend. Would that our second was today, an immaculate mid-May Saturday at the beginning of a Mets-Yankees series. First of the season, last of an era. What will a new stadium do for this flagging team of underdogs with a taste for the good life? But before we find that out, there is this strange season of sharp inhales and long exhales…

Our game was a day game in a double-header against the Reds. Cool spring day, clear with far away clouds. The Mets won despite a less-than-stellar performance by our star pitcher Johan Santana. We were hitting, a less-than-typical situation for us. A thrill to see back-to-back homeruns. A thrill to be among the people, our people. Cow Bell Man was wearing a Santana jersey and I didn’t recognize him at first. “Who’s the cowbell interloper?” I asked my husband. “That’s no interloper,” he said. “That’s Cow Bell Man. He wears other jerseys.” I love that my husband knows that. He is a baseball encyclopedia.

“What happens to the roster when they call up a player?” I asked, amid talk of our pitcher woes.
“Someone has to be sent down,” he said.
“Who?”
“Someone who’s pissed,” he replied gravely.

The minor leagues were where I first fell in love with baseball, really. As a poet, I appreciated the clockless innings and ample time to build an experience, a day or an evening. No clueless cheerleaders in stupid outfits. Happy people all around, drunk on the freedom of open-air beer. Back in Greensboro, I went with my MFA friends to Bats games and heckled visiting teams, made up games with peanut husks, and formed a haphazard and probably more annoying than anything fan club around a Bats player, whose family we eventually met. One of my fellow poets became the Bats mascot, Casey the Bat, and we came up with all kinds of ways to try to get him to blow his cover. Like it mattered. But he played along. We all did, back in those crazy days, my days of $375-a-month rent.

How you fall in love with something, someone, becomes a part of the relationship, and it forms a space at its center. A space you either protect because you continue to love the thing or the person, or destroy because you don’t. I carry a little bit of the Bats around with me now, as a Mets fan, despite the fact that the Bats were a farm team for the dreaded Yankees (who the Mets are now leading in the opening game as I watch from my couch). And I'm glad. It's a tender spot in there. I think of them when Gabe and I go out to the basketball court under the elevated tracks and throw the baseball I once fished out of the drainage ditch behind the Bats’ home, War Memorial stadium, before it was torn down and rebuilt, sometime after I left that world for this one.