There’s no spring anymore. The phrase has become accepted truth in the Northeast, or at least in the peculiar ecological zone known as New York City. Here it can feel like we’ve gone straight from slushy winter to muggy summer, with no time to prepare our minds, our skin, our hair, our clothes for the jolting turnabout. Most years I’ve maintained that this is little more than a myth, that there's a blustery, unpredictable little bridge between the two meteorological extremes that can still be identified as spring. But it’s been hard to argue that case this April. After a gray and dismal March, the first eight days of the month progressed from unseasonably warm, to the dog days of 80-degree August, to near-stifling humidity by Wednesday night. The fever has broken for the moment—it’s more typically drizzly and gray as I write this on Friday—but it was a longer dream of summer than I can ever remember having so early in the year.
I’m not complaining; it was a pretty sweet dream. Doors flung wide open in the lobby at work. Warm air on the back of my neck while I typed. The novel thrill of standing around outside, doing nothing more than looking at a garden-variety Manhattan cross street and listening to its incidental soundtrack. A blue and red barber-shop tube rotates upward, a sign of eternal motion, of the city and the world spinning. (Not that I would ever get my lid butchered in that place; you get what you pay for in NYC when it comes to haircuts, and $20 is just enough to get you out the door alive.) Next to the barber is a tiny, busy, 1940s-style shoeshine stand wedged under a red canopy. Across the street are hot-dog vendors’ umbrellas and a Halal food truck. A car horn honks from around the corner. “More Than a Feeling” plays vapidly, aridly, irresistibly on the speakers at a Korean deli. A woman walks one way in knee high black socks, two others pass her the other way in rolled-up jeans and canvas sneakers. (You can picture thousands of women around New York looking outside in the morning, throwing their polka-dotted Wellington rain boots in the closet, pulling out their jeans, and patiently rolling them up to just the right fashionable spot—how do they know where it is?) At my feet floats a McDonald's hamburger wrapper. What makes its crinkled yellow so beautiful, so intense to the eye?
This past weekend, when the dream of summer was at its peak, I saw another inexplicably intense-looking yellow object bouncing along a Brooklyn street: a tennis ball, the ultimate symbol of spring for some of us. Two teenagers, maybe brothers, were in front of their apartment building, tossing the ball back and forth over the dark green awning that covered the entranceway. One kid would throw the ball over the awning, the other would bounce it back to him. There was no order to what they were doing, though. One of them chucked it 20 feet in the air, the other banged it off an iron railing next door and made it bounce crazily out into the street. The stuff of an aimless teenage summer afternoon. As I passed their building, one of them picked up the ball and they headed in the direction of a park near the East River. They looked pleased, in a conspiratorial way. It reminded me of a scene from the Simpsons: Two bums are underneath a bridge, tickling each other with feathers and laughing hysterically. One of them says, in a scratchy voice, “Who needs money when we got feathers?” I imagined one of these Brooklyn kids saying, “Who needs friends when we’ve got . . . a tennis ball."
A tennis ball can do a lot. It adds motion and time to the static facts of the objects around you. It inserts an unpredictable element into space. It also made a perfect substitute for a baseball when my friends and I played pick-up games in our back yard as kids. An actual baseball might have smashed a neighbor’s window, and a wiffleball was hard to pitch and didn’t carry a satisfying distance. A tennis ball was solid but springy. When you caught it right with your aluminum bat, you could stand at the plate—in this case, a five-sided stone in the middle of our patio—and look up in awe, like Babe Ruth or Roy Hobbs or Mike Schmidt, as it arced over the giant pine tree at the edge of the yard and landed, after a bounce or two, in a driveway two doors down. For us, watching it fly felt like an escape. To our elderly neighbors, it might have looked like a miniature yellow UFO touching down out of the sky and heralding an invasion from outer space—“This is the first sign, Martha, it's the tennis balls!” The only trouble was the tendency of those balls to end up on the roof of the house next door, where they found their way into a drainpipe and caused some serious water damage years later. Personally, I’d say it was worth it.
The ball had other uses. Nothing got the family dog tearing around the furniture like the prospect of digging his teeth into its ragged felt. Eventually, in his excitement, he’d forget about what he was chasing and just keep running, faster and faster, a brown blur across the floor. When I was 12 or 13, I would spend a few minutes in bed, before I went to sleep, tossing a tennis ball above my head, trying to catch it while only glimpsing its dim outline in the dark. Maybe I thought this would improve my hand-eye coordination; or maybe I thought it would help my ball toss, I can’t remember. But I did get pretty good at throwing it straight up so that it fell straight down into my hand. Or, almost as often, into my face. (Wait, I do remember why I did this. I read an article about Dwight Gooden where he said he’d been so obsessed with baseball as a kid that he’d tossed a ball above his head in bed before he went to sleep. I must have thought: I’m obsessed with tennis, so this is kind of thing I should be doing.)
Of course, a tennis ball is not a baseball. A baseball is a no-nonsense ball, a blue-collar ball. It’s wound tight and is solid inside. It doesn’t give you any extra, manufactured bounce. It lands with a thud, and it hurts so much when it hits your head that you think you might have brain damage—or at least that’s what I thought when Jeff Waltman threw one to me in a Little League practice and it went past my glove and straight into my forehead. A basketball, on the other hand, is a world unto itself; a kid can spend a productive afternoon trying to perfect a behind the back dribble or learning to spin it on his finger. I succeeded at the former, but never quite got the latter move to work.
A tennis ball is more artificial. It’s friendlier, brighter, lighter, but it lacks any kind of street cred or gravitas. Turn it in the right direction and it looks like a smiley face sign. Lighter than a baseball, it doesn’t feel as good to toss back and forth at long distance—it seems a little lost without its eternal partner, the racquet. In a move toward greater artificiality, tennis, unlike baseball, overthrew its white-ball tradition and went to optic yellow for TV in the 1970s. It even flirted, during the boom years, with orange and purple. I’ll never forget the latter color, because I once tossed a purple tennis ball in the air, hit it with a baseball bat across our lawn, and watched as it bounced toward the garage and approached my sister, who had just rolled out of the garage on a Big Wheel. The ball, as if laser-guided, hit her right in the eye. I don’t think I hit any tennis balls across the lawn for a while after that.
The garage. I have a better memory of it. That’s where, after school when the weather got warm, when we could run around outside again, I would come back home to find three baseball bats and balls lined up on a rack on the wall. On the cement floor, next to an ancient Scott’s push lawnmower, was an old, gritty, comfortable leather basketball. And in front of them was an orange hopper, packed with tennis balls. Everything else in the garage—the mower, the hose, the garden tools—looked darker, duller; each of them represented a chore. When I think about my initial love for sports, for the fun and escape they brought, it goes back to the contrast between those work objects, and the brighter bats and balls scattered between them. The baseball, the basketball, and even more so, the tennis balls, glowing inside the hopper, were ready to be bounced. They were ready to fly. They were ready to be thrown, hit, spun, made to do anything I could make them do with a racquet. They were ready, after months of dreaming of summer, for me to bring them to life.
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Have a good weekend. I'll be back Monday with a (slightly belated) Monte Carlo preview. The tennis season starts fresh once again.