the good rules
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.
What a sweet hour. Falling into the rhythm of this city lets you relax into the tiny spaces you can find in it. They don’t last long, but they are there for the signing up and taking.
shelly
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