Notes From Nowhere

Just when I decided that I may get myself a racket and join Jens playing tennis in Central Park, winter is here. So we took a walk. Something about these tennis courts resonates with me, with the strange mix of pleasure and sadness that can take your mind off mundane tasks and fill you with longing for god-knows-what. Snow was falling in thick flakes. Not much in the end, but in the city every bit of it seems to count as a snow storm. Once the snow is nicely on the ground and the sun is out again, the park will be crowded with kids and parents, riding down the slopes of hills on anything that resembles a sled. Every year, that’s a happy moment in Central Park, children shrieking with pleasure. When I was new in Manhattan it made me realize that, no matter how crazy this place may be, people are really not so different from anyone else. Yesterday, everyone still home during the ’storm’, was entirely different. Without the laughter and commotion of sled-riding, the realities of the neighborhood are more present, the cracks in the walls more visible. Walking back into the streets, I saw a row of empty stores with broken windows, no one bothering to repair things. And no lovely layer of white snow covering it up.

Jens tells me he took up tennis in Central Park, though not the fancy kind where you rent a court. He’s playing where the kids play, public courts fairly high up north, close to where he lives. I’ve been out of touch for too long, working and not keeping up with friends. On the spur of a moment I decided last week I would check in. As he was just about to go to the park, I joined him there. It’s utterly charming, parents teaching their kids tennis, groups of friends playing any kind of game where you’re hitting a ball against the wall, some men practicing what looks like Tai Chi on a smallish court. In the skies and on the fences, large birds. Eagles perhaps or hawks. I wonder whether the tennis balls to them look almost like prey, though never quite. Too yellow, too round. They don’t attack, they watch. Or whether all this activity interferes with what to them is their terrain, a disturbance to be scared away. Well, that doesn’t work either. For me, it’s a New York moment, in a neighborhood that isn’t quite the rich Manhattan of the southern edge of the park, but rather affected from the various recent economic crises. Incongruent, lovely, and a bit threatening. People going about their lives caring for their families and friends, having fun and getting some exercise that doesn’t cost money. Though if you just as much as raise your head you might as well worry.

Upon return from California, I checked the Wikipedia entry on palm trees, aka Arecacaea. I knew they were soul mates. Rather nice to read that they grow solitary or clustered. I’ll take the first option. The difference? Humans are bipeds, I guess, and palm trees, I read, are monopodials. One way or another, charming companions. I took these four with my phone. Just a few miles away from Apple and Google and Oracle and Salesforce (and whatnot) Headquarters, and yet the only thing the phone was good for at this point was taking pictures. Occasionally there was an Edge network, state of the art in the 1990s I think. In other words, no maps. The sun was about to go down. I followed signs. One said: “If a mountain lion attacks you, strike back!” This struck me as a tall order for a biped…