Last Thursday morning, while I was drinking coffee and two tennis players, Florian Mayer and Juan Ignacio Chela, were traipsing groggily around a hot-looking clay court on the TV, church bells started to ring down the street. I live in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, around the corner from the Moonstruck bakery and not too far from the docks where Last Exit to Brooklyn was filmed. The bells ring all the time here, from the area’s many half grand, half decrepit old churches, one of which Tony Soprano nearly had a heart attack in a few years ago. They ring for reasons that often escape me. Thursday morning they began at 8:00 A.M. on the dot, but they tolled many more than eight times; someone seemed to be ringing them just for the sake of the sound, a sound that makes me feel as if nothing can possibly go wrong that morning (even if I know better). After a few minutes, I began to feel like I was in yet another movie featuring an Italian-American: Rocky. Or was it Rocky III? Tough to tell.
Time is on my mind at this time of year, as it is every May. I had a birthday recently, but even as I added year, life returned like new to the trees and the streets around me. The world doesn’t age, it starts over.
If there’s one tournament that follows suit, it’s Rome. Whatever name it has in a given year—Italian Open is still the way I like to think of it—and whatever new arenas are erected and renovations made to the Foro Italico, it’s still defined by those kitschy Fascist classical statues that stand guard around the courts. They may have been built in the 20th century, but they look eternal enough for the Eternal City. And, by the way, that has to be the best nickname for any location on earth. You can have your City of Light, your City of Brotherly Love, your City of Broad Shoulders, your City of Angels: Rome outlives them.
The name has felt a little more resonant to me this year. As I said, my birthday came at the start of the month, but even without that as a reminder, I’d been thinking, apropos of I’m not sure what, about how differently we experience time as we get older—or at least how differently I experience it. The spark came from reading a line by Updike that he wrote in his 70s, as he looked back on his brief, between-marriage bachelor days in Boston 35 years earlier:
I lived in Boston once, a year or two, in furtive semi-bachelorhood.
I parked a Karmann Ghia in Back Bay’s shady spots, but I was lighter then, and lived as if within forever.
(Speaking of which, there’s a vintage purplish Karmann Ghia that keeps popping up in my neighborhood, like an old friend you see now and then, or a person from the hood who you don’t know but you think you would like to meet. Very cool looking bug of a car. What happened to cars, anyway; why don’t they look like that anymore? In 30 years, will I stop and admire a Toyota Yaris the way I do the long white ’65 Impala with the pale-blue interior that often sits a few blocks away from my apartment. I was inspecting it one afternoon, as I always do when I see it, when I heard someone behind me say, in a gravelly Brooklyn accent, “You like that?” It was the owner, standing in his doorway, smoking a cigar, smiling. “Pretty nice, eh?”)
“Within forever”: It describes how I felt, or how I think I felt, when I was in my teens and 20s. There was no end to time then; there was no such thing as “wasting it,” wasting it was the point. On summer vacations to the Jersey Shore I liked to lie on the couch in the small back TV room at my grandmother’s house doing nothing more than staring out the window at the big water tank on the horizon, watching it go in and out of focus in the heat. The couch was extremely itchy, but I liked it better that way, I liked the discomfort—I had time for discomfort, they way I once had time for free jazz. At home, on quiet days away from school with nothing to do, I liked to lie upside-down off the living room couch and stare at the opposite wall until the books on the shelves completely blurred together. Then I would close my eyes and start over.
