Ross Gay's "Overheard"

Thoughts on the intimacy of a city.

Overheard

It’s a beautiful day
the small man said from behind me
and I could tell he had a slight limp
from the rasp of his boot against the sidewalk
and I was slow to look at him
because I’ve learned to close my ears
against the voices of passersby, which is easier than closing
them to my own mind,
and although he said it I did not hear it
until he said it a second or third time
but he did, he said It’s a beautiful day and something
in the way he pointed to the sun unfolding
between two oaks overhanging a basketball court
on 10th Street made me, too
catch hold of that light, opening my hands
to the dream of the soon blooming
and never did he say forget the crick in your neck
nor your bloody dreams; he did not say forget
the multiple shades of your mother’s heartbreak,
nor the father in your city
kneeling over his bloody child,
nor the five species of bird this second become memory,
no, he said only, It’s a beautiful day,
this tiny man
limping past me
with upturned palms
shaking his head
in disbelief.


from Bringing the Shovel Down (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011)

---

I am going to talk about sports, because, well, at the time you are reading this, the New York Knicks are either continuing to play for the NBA Championship, or have just won their first title in decades.¹ Whether you care or not, I’m sure you are aware of this, mostly because, well, when something of note happens to a sports team in New York City, it seems to happen to the whole world. This is a beautiful thing if you, as I do, happen to live in this city, but I would not be surprised if everyone who does not live here finds it quite annoying.

This city is something special now, and has been for the past several days and weeks. There are few things better, in my mind, than the experience of living within an act of collective attention, particularly when the object of such attention is relatively low stakes,² as a sport is, and offers the potential for moments of great joy, as sports do. Walk anywhere in this city, and you will see people and places rising to the occasion of this moment: orange and blue flags draped out of windows, just-bought tee shirts and long-worn ones. You will notice longtime fans ribbing the new bandwagoners, wanting to know if they were there for the years of losses. You will hear it, too: shouts and cheers blurted into the otherwise calm warmth of some late afternoon—one person to another from across the street, a car window rolled down, a raised hand, a wave, a fist, any kin of gesture in response to someone honking or shouting or cheering. And then there will be the watch party spilling out into the street in Midtown, the jersey-donned man gazing up at the game projected onto some Lower East Side wall, or the barstools pulled onto the sidewalk to surround a janky television leaning on some storefront window. It’s mayhem; it’s community; it’s joy; it’s oddity; it’s bedlam; it’s vitality—it’s New York, baby.

And so, I am thinking of this poem today because New York City is a city of the overheard, as so many cities are. It is a place of density and up-close-ness. That is its beauty, and anyone who has lived here for a long, long time will tell you that such intimacy—particularly of strangers, people who touch you once, often without realizing, a hand against a shoulder, a bag rubbed against your back, and then never touch you again—is part of its charm, that, when they are sleeping in some quiet place, with in-laws in the suburbs or with friends atop a mountain, the quietness confounds and even scares them. There is no noise that is too loud for New York, but there are silences that are the stuff of fear.

And yet, despite all of that closeness and intimacy and noise, there is still a real sense of what Gay mentions in this poem today:

I was slow to look at him
because I’ve learned to close my ears
against the voices of passersby, which is easier than closing
them to my own mind

For all the talk of the rampant violence and craziness of New York City’s subways, usually egged on by conservative media and people who live somewhere that is not here, such subways are quite often places of surreal quiet—a quiet that can be punctured for a stop or two by the can’t-read-the-room chatter of kids on their way home from school, or by a performer hustling onto the train with a bluetooth speaker and a hat that they can make twirl a thousand times before catching it with their foot, or their elbow, or their head. But these are noises that interrupt what is otherwise, so often, a group of people insisting on their solitude in a place of absolute company: those listening to music on their headphones, those scrolling, then pausing, then scrolling, those eating a whole meal all by themselves, as if the train were their dinner table. Such an act is an act that insists that such a person is there alone, even in crowded company.

It’s an act, too, that makes us need people to repeat themselves, as Gay mentions, until we decide to actually listen:

although he said it I did not hear it
until he said it a second or third time

People must make those personal insistences of individual space in this city because otherwise it is a city of unasked-for closeness, and the trouble is that such closeness, I think, makes people believe in the worst of us, which is part of what any intimacy entails: a deep knowledge of the worst parts of each other, alongside the parts we love the most. In this city, I have stepped on human shit and dog shit; I have been accosted by strangers; I have had my lap sat on by someone I didn’t know; I have been yelled at and I have yelled; I have watched a rat board a train; I have born witness to incalculable rage; I have seen a trash can spontaneously combust.

Conservative media (and, really, all media) takes those worst parts of ourselves and makes them out to be all we are. Such a practice is a lesson in un-seeing. The thing about seeing is that you can do so much with an act like that. You can zoom in until the great microscopic parts of ourselves expand into utter universes. Or you can zoom out until the smallness that we are feels connected to some larger thing. But you can’t do nothing. You can’t erase. You can’t look at one part of anything, whether a person or a place, and say this is all there is. To do such a thing is to call your ignorance knowing, which is another way of calling yourself a liar.

Ross Gay, by the way, is a poet who deconstructs the move from ignorance to surprise to joy. It’s there in today’s poem:

the way he pointed to the sun unfolding
between two oaks overhanging a basketball court
on 10th Street made me, too
catch hold of that light

And it’s there in one of my favorite poems of his, “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian,” which begins, as today’s does, with Gay’s own ignorance:

Tumbling through the
city in my
mind without once
looking up

The poem moves toward the image of a tree; it begins to notice that tree, and the work done to keep that tree alive, and the joy arising out of that work. The poem ends with these lines:

we are feeding each other
from a tree
at the corner of Christian and 9th
strangers maybe
never again.

So yes, alongside all of those parts of New York that are sometimes awful and sometimes uncomfortable and certainly strange, and sometimes even on the same day as having experienced one of those things, I could tell you about how I have walked into the corner bodega by my school and said hi to Danny³ by the grill, who then proceeds, without any instruction on my part, to make me the same sandwich he makes me anytime he sees me, which means, amidst all of this bullshit and noise and oddity and love and stink and scent and density and sound, he has decided to know me in some small way. To be known, amidst all of this? To be seen? That’s a gift.

I could tell you, too, about what you see and what you overhear when you decide to listen not just for pain, but also for joy. I could tell you about the man who walks his dog by Fort Tryon Park, and how, each time I see the two of them, I watch as the man walks his dog close enough to these boulders that line the road, so that his dog can bound atop them the way a child might skip from one rock to another atop a river.

Just like the speaker of today’s poem, I have also experienced the surprise of a kind of kindness. The intimacy of a city is the intimacy of what you allow yourself to witness. I want to be open to the possibility of the overheard: the man who says it’s a beautiful day. The dog bounding from rock to rock. The people gathered under a tree, on the two benches in the traffic island amidst the intersection.

Lately, while walking my son around in his stroller, I have found myself pausing at the basketball courts near Fort Tryon Park. If you walk past them in the late afternoon or early evening, there will almost certainly be a pickup game happening: grown men and teenagers going full-tilt on the full court, surrounded by toddlers sprinting circles around a jungle gym. All the while: the recurring, endless jingle of the ice cream truck somewhere around the corner.

I stop there often, watching from the other side of the fence. There are usually the same core group of people, varying in age from someone who could be as young as sixteen to someone who could be as old as sixty. There are varying levels of ability, too. And attire. Some in cutoff hoodies and others shirtless, all of them sweating and some of them really sweating and a few of them taking every available moment to hang out with their head bowed and their hands on their knees. But god, they all try. They really try. And they care. And it is that caring that makes the game so intoxicating to watch. They call foul and they yell and they guard one another with a passion that borders on rage and they drive to the hoop and they put up jumpers that a literal angel would have to help them make and they have something to say about everything, and the whole time, amidst all of this slapping and shooting and bickering and playing, they are moving up and down the court as this kind of collective force, pendulum-like, an energy of its own making.

I stand there, overhearing them, near those courts above the river.

And maybe that’s something I realize in this city: our joy, when witnessed, can be shared. You abandon a great deal of privacy when you live here. You give it up, plainly. You have no say. And so I don’t begrudge anyone who tries to create what privacy they can, who tries to make out of their morning commute a cocoon of personal experience. And yet, the courts are public and the parks are public and the view of the river is anyone’s to see. And so yes, if you are wondering, I did buy a basketball the other day, and, on my morning walk with my son, I went to the courts before they became crowded, and I rolled him into the shade that covered most of the top of the key, and I shot some jumpers. In some other life, I would fear being overheard in this moment—sweating and pretending to take on a three month old in a game of one on one. But not today, not now.⁴ Overhear me. See me.

The joy of these recent days, experienced in the midst of a collective moment of attention, is the fact that, I think, more people are willing to be open to what our closeness allows. Let’s go Knicks, one stranger says to another. Go Knicks, go, one adult says to a toddler walking along with their parent. Windows open. People lean out of them. They want to hear that they are not alone in their celebration. They want to believe that it is possible not to be alone at all.

---

1. My novel, Pilgrims, is out in the world, and I am deeply grateful. Thank you for reading it and sharing it and all sorts of things. If you are interested, you can buy it here. Consider writing a review on Goodreads if you’d like. Consider asking for it from your local library. I appreciate it. Thank you a million times over.

2. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.

1. Update: They won, and after settling our child to sleep, I ventured outside of our apartment and, within seconds, encountered kids riding bikes and screaming the names of every Knick, fireworks being shot out over the Hudson River, a crowd of hundreds gathered together to sing Sinatra’s “New York, New York.” Every car, honking. Every apartment lit up.

2. The truly low stakes nature of sports is what makes some of the recent moments of fan-on-fan cruelty and violence particularly painful. The thing about low stakes activities—sports, journaling, noodling a bit on the guitar at 3:00 pm on a weekend afternoon—is that they offer, usually, the lowest chance of violence and the highest chance of joy. We too often conflate what feels life-or-death with what has the highest potential payoff of reward, but the truth is that we are probably our happiest when we are our safest, which is something teaching has taught me. A ten-minute journal prompt at the start of class might do more for a kid than any high stakes exam ever will.

3. By the way, Danny, who runs the bodega on the corner of 147th and Concord in the Bronx, is probably the best sandwich-maker in the city. This guy really cares. He’s innovative, interesting, trying new things. He’s making oxtail quesadillas, oxtail chopped cheese, all kinds of cool shit. But if you sometimes just want a solid turkey sandwich, as I do, I mean, like honey turkey with swiss and lettuce and tomato and red onion and a bit of honey mustard and mayo, and if you want it served hot, man. It’s a simple thing made well. Danny rules. My students will tell you the same thing. We worked on a profile of him for our school newspaper in my journalism class.

4. Besides, my shot is, dare I say, pretty smooth. See below for reference. Two out of three ain’t bad.