News of the World

The grass is so drenched with night rain that the dogs pass through it like little kids running in feathery snow. The soccer fields are full up with summer players, out early to avoid the heat. Runners ring the fields, checking watches and fit bits as they jog. I steer my charges for the back lot and the sandy promises of an uninhabited river bend. The morning paper headlined the street battles in Ferguson: a year later, the police are back out in their battle gear, young men are getting shot, and protesting citizens are getting arrested en masse. It's as if one long curfewed night has extended to cover the four seasons, and we're back in the same place, the same lockdown headlock tailspin. What to do with this world of ours so fractured and fractious?! On the way to these fields, my neighbor drove past without a) seeing me, b) registering my existence, or c) acknowledging it. Nor, when he turned out onto East Hawthorne, did he see, register or acknowledge the car speeding toward him, and so had to pick it up to avoid getting rear-ended. The guy tailgated him all the way down to River Road to punish him for his transgression. I have been reading Teju Cole's novel, Open City, and in it the main character (Nigerian born, in the States studying to be a psychiatrist) walks restlessly through the Manhattan streets. His thoughts expand out as he moves, touching upon his work, his personal life and current events, but also the city’s Dutch history and life after 9/11. These thoughts mix seamlessly into his encounters on the street and on the subway, just as my thoughts get mixed into the suburban scene before me. I have to laugh at the sight of a sodden lounger sprawled open beside an empty green dumpster. Why can't the police in Ferguson see that their stance is the main part of the problem? Their stance and their force. What if they put down their weapons and took off the war gear and came into the neighborhoods to talk, really talk? Could they ever just come as peacekeepers and as friends and as neighbors? For not until they alter their approach and agenda, not until they stop shooting first (and shooting to kill), will anything change. Can’t they recognize that, acknowledge it? Reaching the furthest field, I turn back for the car. The puppy flops literally head over heels into the wet grass and slithers around on her back. As I wait for her, I remember a scene in the Cole novel. The nameless main character is coming down from Harlem and watches himself not get off on 116th. Then he doesn't get off at next stop, or the next. Eventually he's all the way down in Wall Street where he comes upon the 9/11 site, still an empty hole. The Trinity Church is locked up for the night, so the man, filled to bursting with loneliness, ends up at water's edge, looking out over the river. His thoughts are a jumble. He muses on 9/11, the role of the Trinity church in early Manhattan life, on white whales appearing upstream, of the river history of Manhattan and of Moby Dick, about grief tourism and what it means to live in New York at this time, and of his girlfriend leaving him. The scene ends with him watching the skateboarders rise up off the cement and, for a brief moment, fly up into the air.