So small and so innocent – like the face of a child or of children, then ones you see hung over the shoulders of a mother who seems to barely notice they are carrying it – that was how it arrived at my feet.
Sitting in Marco Rampiz Park on the corner of Marcy and Metropolitan, the screaming trucks barreling through the intersection carrying loads of heavy metal and steel, of thick, rusted chains and palates of broken, sharp medieval looking bits, the kind of haul that bounces up and down when even the slightest pot hole is hit, sending a bombing noise outward, threatening to crush the old brick facades of buildings. Pedestrians made their trek across the intersection, eyes forward as if in a trance, oblivious to how close the rear bumper of some gigantic rusted metal behemoth on wheels just came to slicing their right leg in half.
The sound of whooshing cars and the low lurch of semi truck horns poisoned the air behind me on the 278, a wide-laned elevated freeway that is so congested I think sometimes it might crumble form the weight of the vehicles. The freeway’s 60 foot supports snake through Brooklyn and Queens like the Roman aqueducts of old, the kind that you still can see in remote areas of France and Italy and Spain. They brought water to thousands. This bit of infrastructure brings stress and billowing clouds of stinking smog clouds.
The sun seemed high in the sky that afternoon, cutting through the heavy gray rain clouds that were departing quickly but had just a half an hour earlier laid down a thin covering of rain on the earth, just enough to smell it as it seeped into the small, trash-strewn parcels of grass that dot the landscape. Even though it was early fall, maybe 2 in the afternoon, the beams were blinding, and seemed to intensify as they were cut by the golden leaves still hanging on from the tree branches. I sat on a park bench, placing a New York Post with a headline screaming “SWINE FLU SNAFU” under my hind area to stave off wetness. As I let it soak up the moisture that the bench had sucked up like a dry sponge, I gazed around and began to wonder – again – about what I was doing here.
This place, so foreign from where I’d come from, with its constant movement. Nothing ever stops here. Nothing ever comes to an end. There is perpetual motion. And it has at times made me a bit mad. The scowling faces that meet my sincere “hey there, how are you?” are making me a bit bitter. I don’t hold doors open for strangers anymore. It just doesn’t seem practical to do here, to break out of that heavy mold of self-reliance that defines so many behaviors. To be alone in a place with so many people, to feel lonely amongst a slathering of humanity. To be silent among so much noise. To be reprimanded for helping. These are some of the most obvious of the myriad contradictions that exist here. I have fresh eyes, I see them. I have a fresh heart, too, made soft and eager to help – longing to assist – from a life spent in communities where such a desire was not looked upon with ultimate contempt or even disgust, such as is the case here, right on this corner.
I could feel my underside beginning to dampen, so I stood up and took the paper in my hands. I began to read it, some story about how much the city of Philadelphia is inferior to New York. The World Series was on, so, yeah, I got it. But of course, every New Yorker will tell you that every city in the world is inferior to what has been constructed and hewn on this relatively small piece of real estate. Arrogance, it’s a hallmark here.
I heard some children laughing They just got out of school and are playing on the swings, trying to get as high as they can, pulling on the chains and straining their little are ligaments and looking like they might defy physics and actually loop around the central beam of the swing structure. They can’t though, but it sure is fun to try. A few nannies are playing with their surrogate children, sending them down a twisting plastic slide. The children’s’ voices echo as they scream inside the tube, then, as they emerge into the world, their voices burst like its being born, and it makes my ears scratch. They stick out, these strange couplings. They never look the same. Black nanny, white child. Asian nanny, white child. Hispanic nanny, white child. You get the picture.
I go back to reading the paper. Page Six. Tabloids. I begin to despise humanity for a moment and our lust for celebrity status that we will never attain, subconsciously know it, and therefore root for the destruction of those who are famous. It’s a pathetic way to live and think and might one day lead to our financial ruin. Really.
Then, suddenly, I see something cut through the bottom right corner of my peripheral vision, just below my right wrist. It rolls through a bit of sunshine that is focused on a cigarette butt and a small collection of yellow Locust tree leaves. I snatch the paper out of my vision and look as this purple orb comes to a soft end to its rolling in the corner of some chain link fencing. It steadies itself, and then stops completely.
For a moment, I am stunned and confused. I gaze around to see if it came from a handball court, but there are none of those here. Perhaps it came from a child’s wild toss across the street, but there were no children across the street. The abandoned lot kitty-corner to the park? Empty and depressed looking with its three foot tall grass, which catches all sorts of dingy items that blow into it: plastic bags, opened condom wrappers, Styrofoam take-out boxes with splotches of some sodium-laden sauce in it.
I bent down to pick it up. It was firm like a racquetball and soiled with dirt and mud and leaves. I held it up to a group of three Latino kids sitting on a bench next to me. They shook their heads. I walked, still a bit stunned, toward a basketball game taking place in the back of the park. Nine black boys, one white boy. They’d been playing their game for a while and didn’t notice me. A few park employees stood around the entrance to a restroom hut in the middle of the park, talking and laughing, one of them resting their arm on a broom. They wore blue plastic gloves, the kind that a surgeon wears while performing surgery. They didn’t throw the ball, they said, no one would, they added. These are a premium item around here. Handball is THE pastime in a city park.
So I entered the men’s bathroom and turned the tap on the faucet on. It made the cracked porcelain sink – which looked like an afternoon WPA project – shake and shiver. I washed the ball off and I dried it with one and a half feet of brown paper towel.
I placed the ball in my black messenger bag on my way out of the park. We walked home together, wondering why we came into each other’s lives. No one stopped me.
