We stop on the way home from school most days at a playground where Scout and her school buddies (all girls, is how it shakes out) play pirates and families, and Japhy looks around for a bunch of boys to latch onto. He doesn’t care how old they are; whatever they’re doing, he’ll wander over in his Yankees hat and try to join in. Usually, it’s a bunch of 9-year-olds skateboarding, and Japhs, 4, will open with a cracker from his arsenal of small talk like, “Hey! Do you like the Yankees?” (his favorite team) or, “Do you know Aaron Judge?” (his favorite player). He pursued a boy a couple of months ago around and around the playground on account of the kid wearing a baseball hat. “Which team do you like?” Japhy was asking in his assertive and guttural 1920s cigarette boy kind of way — he often has the qualities, I think, of a 4-year-old Artful Dodger in his oldey timey jersey and jaunty hat — and the boy finally ran away yelling “It’s not a baseball team logo, it’s just a brand!”
Nothing seems to put Japhy off.
The other day at the discotheque that is the Jackie Robinson playground in the mid-afternoon, he was drawn to two grown men playing basketball.
Japhs wandered over and sat on the little skate jump nearby the half court, waiting patiently for them to invite him in. These were men in their mid-twenties, I’d guess from the springy muscles and diamonds of hard-cut youth that tinkled onto the ground as they moved about. They didn’t acknowledge him, so he just sat there, legs dangling, freckled nose wrinkled up, watching and hoping he might wheedle his way into the game. I was up in the gods’ gallery, where the parents hang out, when I saw he was trying even harder to join in. Japhy was now standing just outside the half court lines, and had turned his Yankee hat backwards, the same as one of the guys. This got their attention. They stopped their game of shirts and skins, and bounced the ball to him.
BIG MOMENT: Japhy rolled, rather than threw, it back to them, and they bounced it back. After a few times doing this, they told him he had played well and had won three points. Three points! I had hovered over, and at this moment transubstantiated into La Croix and ascended into the air, drifting toward the Atlantic on the gulfstream.
Like a creep, I took a quick photo just before he broke into the circle and I was given my harp and sent skyward by the little backwards hat:
The park is often like that, random kids come up to borrow a bike, or a ball, or sunscreen, and if one of your children chooses to retire to the public bathroom to take a leisurely shit on a grimy stainless steel toilet with no seat (every day… whyy), the parents will keep eyes on your other child while you hover by the door in the willies of heat and sacrilege, asking “Do you need toilet paper yet??” every two minutes.
Jane Jacobs has a whole opus on the dance of the public park, where people at different phases of life — the mothers and children, the masters of the universe headed to work, the teens after school, etc. etc. — occupy the common space at different times of the day, overlapping and criss-crossing as their lives loop the circles of daily routine. This is the money quote, but the entirety of The Death and Life of American Cities is as good:
Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.
This one’s for you, nice/hot basketballers.
How it happened
Changing out the home decor, at a bus stop on First Avenue in the East Village:
Fool me once, effort!
Goodies (and ah, they’re gut)
This is my fave shorthand account of the 1970s, and I don’t know who Amanda Thompson is, beyond “someone in New Zealand,” but the preamble to a date loaf recipe (which uses Weetbix) made me love her.
I HAD NEVER READ ABOUT MITTERAND EATING THE ORTOLAN. If you haven’t, read it now.
“We Have Been Making Shit Up for Some Time” by Richey Piiparinen.
I had a guest spot in my fav newsletter, Evil Witches, this week, talking to the author of Father Figure: How To Be A Feminist Dad.
I probably don’t need to tell you to read the Harper’s piece about the TikTok house, but if you did and it made you think you were dying, then same!
*Hot rec*: a new podcast about the civ-mill (civilian/military) divide, from NPR...
And this has never let me down:
Thank you for reading KAFKA’S BABY! <3 <3 <3 Stay cool under the heat dome if you are near me, and not, say, skiing in the Snowy Mountains back home.