new planet

Here, in a new place, we are closer to the train, the sky. A livelier block, the block at the end of our “old” block, our old lives. How much difference 100 feet makes.

Here, there’s no view from the alley of terraces, but there is a view of a whole planet of Brooklyn life, from a three-story fire escape. If I’m quiet, no one on the ground sees me unless they think to look up. Perched with my friends the squirrels on this thing painted with decades of rust, I watch:

• cats growing in feral backyards
• a giant blue spruce (native to western U.S.) taking up an entire backyard
• decks & roofs in various states of (dis)repair
• a kudzu tower hiding god knows what
• the southern sky pinking and purpling like a light winter bruise you don’t know how you got
• a field of rooftop poles
• the spaceship of a water tower atop the converted warehouses
• neighbors roaming their glowing apartments

We’re not oblivious here in the city…we know we could be being watched at any minute. We adjust our lives to be seen from afar. We don’t mind.

stoopless in brownstone Brooklyn

The lookout. The most important part of a denizen’s city life. To know what others are doing and to be a part of the situation, if only as an onlooker. To give witness. To make real. To be a part of the whole mess of life. Who comes by, when. Deliveries, trash pick-up. Rag-pickers, can-collectors, neighbors, bikers, babies, dogs. Everyone, every thing, every day. This is living in New York: seeing it.

One of our dogs – it has always been one, always this one – wants to look outside. She does not want so much to be outside. She just wants to know what is going on and occasionally say something about it. The screens are torn by her toe-nailed alarms at the large windows at the front of our apartment that overlook the street. Not much goes on on our street – no, that is wrong. So much goes on on our street that I can only see and live a sliver. Doxy, too, lives her sliver, and she loves it.

We are moving in a few weeks, just down the street. We are losing these windows onto the street and our “backyard,” the tiny patio that is my lookout. A lookout to only the backs of buildings, but a lookout for me. Sometimes the backs of buildings and the swath of sky beyond them are exactly what I want to look at.

There will be a new view, new lookouts for both dog and person. New sounds, new smells, new shadows and strangers. Doxy will adjust to the new windows. I’ll have to set something up so she can see out. I wouldn’t ever move into a place where not all of us could see the whole life.

Fall underneath

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.

Bastille Day in Brooklyn

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.

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.