Playing Ball: Trees Grow in Brooklyn

I'm suffering from clay-season overload right now, so I'll take a break and talk about the other tennis season that's starting right now in the Northeast: the playing one. Hang in, because I'll have a few special correspondents—including a certain sartorially resplendent one—checking in from Paris starting on Friday. And CE will be doing its usual bracket breakdown once the draw is out. For now, some local thoughts.

This is the time of year when I dare to pull back the drapes in my living room. There's a single window in the room, a wide, three-pane rectangle that dominates one wall. Through the winter I leave it covered by thin, tan curtains that let in enough light on sunny days to create a pale glow that's bright enough for reading. At night, you can see the blurred lights from the brownstones across the street and the street lamps above. New Yorkers donâ??t get many chances to see stars, so I try to think of those lights as their urban equivalent. It never quite works, but I keep trying.

I leave the drapes closed because I can't stand to see the bare trees that reach toward my window from November to April. They can make even the brightest, crispest days bleak and forbidding. But now, suddenly, there are leaves, lots of them, filling every spare inch of space. After months of bleakness, it takes only a couple weeks for a billowing, waving, green canopy to stretch from one side of my street to the other. Every year the sight of this sudden abundance of nature in the middle of the concrete jungle takes me by surprise. On a recent trip to the Metropolitan Musuem of Art, the most transfixing sight was available on the rooftop terrace, where you had a bird's-eye view of the fresh spring green that had settled over Central Park.

You know about the park, of course, but green is probably not the color that comes to mind when you think of Brooklyn, where I live. It's true, trees grow here, and they're a welcome sight after a day spent among the steel canyons of Manhattan. Outside my window, there's a small tree on my side of the street and a taller one that rises directly behind it on the other side. For some reason that my landlord can't explain, my windows don't stay open for long, so I currently have the middle one propped up with a college-library copy of Robert Penn Warren's textbook, Understanding Fiction. (Not sure if my old English professors would be proud of this fact or not. I'??m also not sure how I obtained it. Did I steal it from the library?)

We don't think of nature as something that happens in the middle of a city, but it may have more of an effect on us here then anywhere else. Looking and listening out my living-room window, I have trouble believing I'??m in the most crowded borough (2.5 million people and rising) of the densest urban area in America. Birds chirp, bicycle wheels hum past, branches wave, kids laugh and scream. The familiar sounds of the cityâ??airplanes, trucks, police sirensâ??are pushed to the fringes of my perception. On bright days, the leaves are a shifting mosaic of light and dark sides; nothing else on a city block catches sunlight like that and brings it so close to you. When I go outside, I walk down the middle of the street for a little while (my block is the last one on the street and there'??s not much traffic). The overhanging trees bend severely toward each other and away from the four-story brownstones on either side, though one branch typically grows in the opposite direction. It looks like the tree is reaching back to hang onto the building.

The trees gives the neighborhood a new architecture. The unchanging straight lines and right angles of the buildings, which dominate through the winter, are now set off and hidden behind the gnarled curves of the trees'?? branches. Of course, those branches are there year round, but during the winter they'??re somehow harder to notice, or to enjoy when you do. This neighborhood as a whole is defined by its rampant greenness. The trees, small gardens, flower-boxes, and bushes that poke out of every spare corner of space have a different effect than, say, a suburban lawn. Rather than an expression of property, nature here links a group of streets and homes and families into a recognizable neighborhood, a small, leafy town inside a big concrete city.

On Sunday I left Federer and Nadal briefly behind and set out for my tennis club for the first time this year. I wasn'??t going to play; I'??m still getting over a months-long hamstring injury (but I'??m almost there). The first stop on the trip was Brooklyn'??s Prospect Park, where I did a three-mile jog and prayed for no pain in my leg. Walking into any park now makes me think of the mysterious murder scene in *Blow-Up*, where the wind blowing through the trees sounds at once ethereal and sinister. Rather than a frantic Vanessa Redgrave, though, I'??m confronted with the world in full recreational mode. There are Jamaicans playing cricket, Mexican families playing volleyball, child yuppies playing soccer. There'??s even tennis, in the form of the 100-year-old Tennis House, a handsome neoclassical (or something) structure that once served as the club and locker room for the park'??s dozens of lawn tennis courts. The courts were replaced decades ago by baseball fields (whose outfields are now being invaded by makeshift soccer grounds), but the house itself remains.

I'??ve only recently begun to run with an IPod, and it's still a rush. The British rock critic Simon Frith (not Cowell) has written that time, as a fact, doesn'??t exist unless there'??s a drummer creating it. It'??s hard to disagree with him when the various rhythms in my ears keep changing my sense of reality, of how slow or fast the world is moving. Lines from songs jump out, burn the brain, and recede again: ??"??We put on Ray Charles and broke up"?; "??I couldn'??t have loved her more than in her plain old everyday clothes"?; "??When you're lost in the rain in Juarez and it'??s Easter time, too"?; ?"Another girl in the neighborhood/Wish she was mine, she looks so good."?

But I still love to run without music. Left to its own devices, the park creates its own. An African drum circle, a whizzing pack of bikes, birds calling back and forth, your own (labored) breathing—the place has its own rhythm, as well as a subtle and seemingly haphazard sense of time, which, like Frith says, you can only sense through the relations of sounds.

I ran out of the park at the other end and continued on toward the club. It'??s a few blocks south, hidden deep inside a once-Jewish, now Caribbean neighborhood. The surrounding blocks are pretty chaotic—??rather than birds chirping, there'??s reggae blasting from the back of a truck. Then you turn a corner into what looks like a gravel parking lot, but which is really the (rather humble) entrance to the club. You walk 100 yards, take a left, and you're face to face with something totally unexpected: five Har-Tru courts and a modest clubhouse (a much grander one, which was almost a century old and came complete with two bowling alleys, was burned down by arsonists in the 1980s) wedged in between train tracks and a looming set of apartment buildings.

It's quiet back here, compared with the noise of the streets outside. But as you walk farther, you begin to pick up the rhythm of the place. It's the rhythm of tennis balls as they meet strings, and there'??s something reassuring about it after all these months. After the revved-up sights and sounds of the city, tennis looks and sounds determinedly low-tech and sanely paced—??human-scale. When New York suffered a blackout in 2003, one of my regular partners and I could only think of one thing to do: go to the club and play tennis. It didn'??t require anything but a racquet and a ball and an open court.

I walked up to the clubhouse and took a seat overlooking three courts. Like the trees outside my apartment, a tennis court gathers sunlight and radiates it in a way we can understand. The three rectangles in front of me were glowing with bright, early-afternoon sun, and balls were popping leisurely back and forth. At one point, a man who lives in the apartment building that overlooks the courts, and who we'??ve all heard for years, opened up his window and began to curse us—it's his backyard, after all. It'??s time for tennis in the city again.