shellytown

How I know I’ve found my home in New York: Fall comes so readily here, a friendly young snuffling up your hems and into your hair, that early wind with the cool belly that you feel as August draws its thick days away. You feel night coming sooner. You feel the tiny nip in the air. You turn off your ACs at night. You are kinder to the people you encounter. You are happy again.

Fall to me is an eternal memory book: Every one of them prompts a nostalgia I’m sure will only grow stronger as I grow older. I always think of the last one when the new one comes around. This fall, I think of leaving my job in Manhattan and beginning my love affair with my bike. I think of the beginning of a false school year: Last year I was, and still am, not in school, but because I work in a school, I get to pretend. I think of visiting a friend in the mountains of New Jersey, dragging Doxy out of the creek’s thick mud and dreaming of Oso. I think of falling for Brooklyn – not just New York, Manhattan, “the city” as we all call it – but the town where I live. Working here means I am always here. And when you are always somewhere, that somewhere one day becomes a here.

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.