backyard encounter

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.

big day

Another Memorial Day, another weekend to honor Oso and what he stood for in my life. I write about him every year under the "in honor | Oso" section here on my site. Here's what this year's entry is about:

firsts and lasts

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.

industrial muffin factory

Mitting the smell in my memory, I walk up Smith Street, an incline gently rising toward the city where I've decided to live. Jackhammers and backhoes followed me here, from New Jersey where apparently many of them live. Now they rumble through the field a block away from our apartment, puncturing the morning with the sound of metal on metal. Is it strange that everywhere I’ve lived, something needed to be torn up or torn down? Strange machines crawl into the open fence every morning to do their work. This morning I found one, silent and hulking, in the church playground where the dogs run illegally. Rico peed on its tire, as tall as I am.

But even stranger things live here, live unseen here. For instance: the lovely smell that wafts over our neighborhood almost every morning. We puzzled over it for weeks: Is it the bakery on Court? Which one? Is it the bagel shop on Smith and 9th? No…What the hell is it? Nothing should smell this good, at the butt end of Carroll Gardens by the BQE, the refuse plant, the Gowanus Canal, and the Kentile sign for the love of god. But it does.

Then I found it. The industrial muffin factory is tucked away on 3rd or 4th or 5th St. off Smith, near the Gowanus in an unmarked warehouse, plastic curtains unable to hide its delicious secret. I saw the carts of muffins the other day, small workers scurrying away from the light. Making muffins, packaged and ready to go. From who knows where to us, the people of the light.

Other unseen things live here: As in, the man who makes his home in an old Chevy stationwagon parked on Smith, across from the Field of Destruction, just a few blocks south of the industrial muffin factory. This skinny man in a windbreaker survived the winter on Smith St. in his stationwagon, attached to which are all manner of containers and supplies, as if he were camping in the urban wilds of Brooklyn. Which I suppose he is. Or was – after his windshield got busted up by what was probably a baseball bat at the end of March, he was gone a week later.

But the machinery of destruction stayed. As did the delicious smell from the industrial muffin factory. The field is these creatures’ home, their work far from over, and the muffins are probably in the bodega on the corner in a neighborhood where some of us continue to live.

similar springtimes

School buses on spring mornings, idling under the clean baby green of the new-leafed trees that line up, good citizens of Brooklyn, on the sidewalks. Good kids wait in line, too. At the bus stops, they are all combed hair and silent concentration. Other kids run wildly up the side streets, desperate yet silent in a way the others aren’t. Your lives may or may not be harder, I say to the wild ones in my head. Who knows?

Mornings are quiet, controlled versions of the chaos of the afternoons and evenings here. Not quite awake, Brooklyn is full of wet flowers, walking dogs, loquacious crossing guards, silent joggers, and parents walking the combed kids to the bus stops, while the sober old men of Brooklyn, still asleep in their twin beds at the Van Westerhout Cittadini Molesi Cultural & Social Club, Inc., dream of the deep dark green of Vietnam in ’74 or of Sicily, in another world, in a similar springtime.