Sometimes I sleep on a second-floor terrace just one story above the Brighton Beach boardwalk, where my friend Susan, her parents, two corpulent brothers, and a German Shepherd squeeze into a two bedroom apartment. The dining alcove has been converted into her “bedroom,” but we much prefer bunking out on her tiny terrace, the closest we will come to camping in the mountains—or anywhere. We listen to the pummeling waves after we run out of conversation around 3 A.M., and we don’t mind when the bright sunshine wakes us a few hours later.

Time for the beach! Towel to towel, blanket to blanket, we etch out our patch of sand, lathering ourselves with baby oil because no one yet warns about UV rays and Ozone holes. We swim out just a bit farther than our courage allows, convinced that the whistle-blowing lifeguards will never spot any sharks in these waters, just as we believe jellyfish have migrated south to Florida.

I don’t realize how fortunate I am to live so close to the beach, unlike millions of sweating Americans in land-locked states like Iowa who never see an ocean let alone walk to one. “Lazy,” my mother reprimands when I ask for carfare to ride the bus less than a mile to the ocean. And my accountant father teaches me a short lesson in finance: “If you save fifteen cents on the bus, you can buy a knish for lunch.”

I do, sometimes two, at Mrs. Stahl’s, where the salt air mingles with the sweetness of cherry cheese. Across the street looms Brighton Beach Baths, a private pool club where I believe the idle rich hobnob. I don’t yet know that real jet setters are sunbathing topless on the Côte d’Azur—and not playing gin rummy for ten cents a game or lounging around an over chlorinated cement-decked pool where toes don’t get sullied in the sand.

We never cross Ocean Parkway, the boulevard some compare, with une peu d’imagination, to the Champs Elysees. Ocean Parkway divides the familiarity of Brighton Beach with the uncertain terrain of Coney Island. Only once a year on my summer birthday, my Orthodox grandmother gives my older brother five dollars and says, “Spend the day together in Coney Island.” Six feet tall, he is my escort and protector. Five dollars buys more giddying rides than we can handle, with money left over for lunch at Nathan’s—someplace my kosher grandmother would never enter.

I don’t go to camp when the beach is near enough that interlopers park in front of our house and trudge their chairs and umbrellas a mile to nirvana. Weekdays are quieter, after my father rides a stifling D train for an hour to work in what’s now called Tribeca. Our camp is the street. The gutter, actually. My brothers’ friends put mesh goal posts on either end of East 7th Street, setting up a tar hockey field. When the occasional car beeps its way through, the pick-up teams remove the goal posts until the coast is clear.

Every Tuesday night we walk to Shore Parkway, where long ago, it seems, we sledded down Suicide Hill, aptly named because if you don’t steer your sled correctly you’d end up in the service road of the parkway. We climb the ramp on the overpass above the highway. The noise of cars whizzing behind us fades when the weekly fireworks explode from a barge in Lower New York Bay. Our entire neighborhood—Italians and Jews, immigrants and holocaust survivors, first generation professionals and 1950’s housewives, children who have never been west of New Jersey—cluster above the highway for a partial, but adequate, view. The fireworks are rudimentary compared to today’s rock and celebrity-studded celebrations. Yet we all harmonize a collective “Oooooh!” and “Ahhhhh!” to exult every boom.

If there is a breeze anywhere in this borough, it’s atop this highway. After the last blast, we descend slowly. If our behavior has been worthy this past week, our parents might reward us with chocolate ices on the way home. It will give us all a few more minutes outside…before meandering reluctantly back to our stuffy houses.

We’d heard stereotypes about suburban soccer parents too: sports was their life—they pushed their kids into competitive sports and demanding travel teams, whereas we spent our free evenings at the theatre or in book clubs. It turned out we were all more alike than we’d have imagined: some of us lived in houses with basements and backyards, and others lived in high-rise co-ops always short on closet space. But our greatest similarity was the excitement and devotion we felt for our daughters: how we enjoyed the teams’ wins, suffered through their losses, and always brought folding chairs and blankets for inclement weather (a lesson we’d learned from our Westchester opponents).

Years ago, when I first enrolled Amy in a recreational soccer league run by parent volunteers, we emphasized “having fun” and “building skills.” When the score became one-sided, we’d slow down the offense. Our kids attended a Quaker school, where meetings were held to debate whether Quaker values can co-exist with athletic competition.

Eventually our girls wanted a greater challenge. Our solution: forming a tournament team who practiced once a week (if you could make it). Timidly–and naively–we left our cement world and entered our first regional tournament, 30 miles away in Teaneck, New Jersey. We were used to subways and roller-blading as modes of transportation, but we rounded up cars to pool the girls to Soccer Palace, an armory turned into an indoor weekend stadium. There were tanks outside, and a dire sign at the entrance: LEAVE YOUR BODY ARMOR HERE. Military men in camouflage patrolled. Last week our girls had participated in Peace Week at their Quaker school, and here we were in fighting territory.

We knew we were out of our league when the other teams arrived in their snazzy uniforms with matching warm-up suits. We’d avoided the hefty fee to purchase uniforms with each girl’s name on the back, using an extra set leftover from recreational soccer (maroon–the boring color no team had wanted). The sleeves were too long on many girls, and they wore soccer socks in every color of the rainbow. Other teams had cool names, like Torpedoes, emblazoned even on their matching socks! We didn’t even have a name, listed unromantically as DUSC (Downtown United Soccer Club).

I nicknamed them the Rag Tag Team. The Torpedoes jogged into Soccer Palace, two-by-two, in perfectly fit formation. Our girls lazed on the floor, chatting. Cheese dripped from Emma’s mouth as she noshed on a slice of pizza. “Don’t complain to me of a bellyache,” admonished our coach, whom we’d hired just a month ago.

The other teams practiced four times a week on expansive suburban fields, whereas we scrounged around for the few ratty playing fields available in the city. They recruited the oldest and biggest girls within the Under 12 age group. We let anyone play who had a lot of enthusiasm and a moderate amount of skill. Except for Riana, a lanky sixth grader, we were 11- and 10-year-olds plus one tiny but tenacious 9.

We faced our first team, and these giants humiliated us 9-0. “Size doesn’t matter, speed does,” the coach said, but our girls named themselves “The Wee Ones Plus Riana.”

They lost all four games. Our best score was 0-0.

It was painful to watch our daughters get trounced; hadn’t they looked so talented in our little city league? Yet they were undeterred. Lucy summed it up this way: “It gave us a chance to be little kids again.”

Two weeks later, back at Soccer Palace, our girls had only one goal: not to win a game, but to score one goal. Just one. Without a coach. He’d let his vacation schedule interfere with their soccer career; he was in Sweden, leaving us alone in New Jersey. A parent volunteer stepped in. The Wee Ones played their best against formidable opponents in Game 1, losing 2-0. The parents worried how another rout would feel, but our daughters were resilient.

During Game 2, a harrowing alarm penetrated the armory. Should we worry? The military men paraded back and forth, nonchalant. The soccer ball had hit a mat on the side wall, covering the weapons vault; this always triggered the alarm, but the tournament must go on.

Game 2: 0-0. Game 3: 5-0, against another tough–and very tall–team.

Our girls guzzled Gatorade, ate snacks high in trans fats, and returned with heads high for the last match at 9:15 PM. Alice, who claimed she was “pretty tired,” refused to let up. Beckham ran the equivalent of 8.8 miles in every soccer game, but our Alice must have clocked 15. She kept taking shots at the goal...and just missing. Our usually quiet section of the grandstand rooted for Alice and The Wee Ones as if this were a Yankees-Mets subway series.

Alice’s umpteenth attempt. She made the goal! She dove flat onto the field in celebratory relief. Our girls jumped up and down in ecstasy. A girl on the opposing team said, “You’re acting like you never scored a goal before.”

And our team responded in unison: “We haven’t!”

We were winning 1-0--with a long 10 minutes left. My daughter scored the second goal, assisted by one of our smallest players who was celebrating her 10th birthday. I was surprised, and embarrassed, by the tears in my eyes.

Back to the city for an 11:30 PM victory dinner, way past their bedtime (and ours). Over dumplings and lo mein, they made a pact to wear their jerseys to school on Monday.

“My mom’s away this week, and she’s the only one who does laundry in our house,” the birthday girl said.

“Air your jersey out by hanging it out your window tonight,” suggested my daughter.

It was a thrill for underdogs to taste victory, and all week I found myself daydreaming about our entire team wearing matching socks–not with their team name on it or anything...just the same color.

That day has come. The Gotham Girls, appropriately dressed in black uniforms with matching yellow socks, have practiced hard enough to join the Westchester league. When the Westchester teams come to our “home” field, they must be startled to find a large green turf on Pier 40, floating atop the Hudson River—and surrounded by a multi-level parking lot filled with trucks. I happen to prefer our away games, when we car pool north (whereas many of us joke that we avoid going above Fourteenth Street if possible). Grandmothers and aunts who live in neighboring towns come to watch our girls play.

On the sidelines we all look alike—with our containers of thirst-quenching cut-up fruit, biting our nails and trying hard not to behave like folding chair coaches. Our daughters are amazed by the high school fields we play on, which look like college campuses. And real grass! We douse ourselves in sun block and enjoy a few hours in nature’s backyard, where birds sing louder than car horns.

After a close game, we refueled at the infamous 89-year-old Walter’s in Larchmont, the roadside stand under a Chinese pagoda known for hot dogs and curly fries. We always knew great places to have lunch because several parents on our team had grown up in Westchester. A friendly couple ahead of us on line told us they worked in the city. “We play in the suburbs,” we told them. “Reverse commuters.” We never imagined ourselves turning into avid soccer moms and dads—weren’t we city mice, after all? Yes…and no. Next weekend we’re facing the Scarsdale Lightning, and I’m dreaming of getting a double hot dog to go with homemade mustard. The taste might linger until we hit the Triboro Bridge.

Candy Schulman’s essays have appeared in Salon.com, The New York Times, New York Magazine, and many other publications. She is an associate writing professor at The New School and has completed a Young Adult novel.

My doorman looked ashen. “A woman jumped,” he said. “18G.”

He was the second person to see the tragedy. A guest was walking toward our building when she watched the woman’s body crash to the sidewalk—after ricocheting off a metal overhang. The impact of such a fall sounds like a bomb. My doorman thought it was a car accident, and ran outside to see what had happened.

“You couldn’t even recognize her,” he said, shaking his head.

It seems no one could recognize her—not even her poor, demented husband. When the police asked what happened, he couldn’t even tell them her age. The doorman said she rarely went out and her husband had been housebound for years—except for an occasional trip to the hospital. Few neighbors knew what she looked like, let alone her name. They had no children. Their caretaker had left to go to the store, and when she returned….

Standing in the lobby, gripping onto bills and unwanted store catalogs, I couldn’t picture the effects of falling eighteen floors onto concrete. The only image in my brain were flattened cartoon characters. I felt morbid curiosity about the details, yet a gruesome aversion to even speculating.

“She didn’t have any clothes on,” my doorman continued.

“Of course not. She was only wearing a robe,” said a neighbor, while I wondered how he knew.

A crowd had formed in our lobby, buzzing with the horrific news.

“Is she dead?” someone asked.

“Of course! Eighteen floors!”

“What happened?”

“She jumped.”

“Or fell.”

“I spent half a day with a dead person once,” our handyman said.

“Maybe her husband pushed her.”

We were on a set of Law And Order. Our building was a crime scene. But reporters weren’t flocking with cameras and notepads. This wasn’t a spectacular news story, like the eleventh grader who’d jumped to his death last year from an 11th floor upper east side private school building, while first graders played in the street below. Or the New York University student who’d climbed over a protective barrier to his death in the school library, where previous suicides had occurred. This was just a humdrum story of an old woman whose life had ended in the saddest, most ghastly, loneliest way. Just another suicide. It happened every day in this city—in fact, averaging 34 per month.

It would be difficult for me to climb out my living room window. How could an ailing octogenarian achieve such a frightful feat?

A spry, well-dressed 86-year-old neighbor peeked out the lobby door and remarked, “I’m just making sure it’s not me. You know why I’d never jump? After I jumped, I’m afraid I might change my mind.”

“When you’re ready, call me and I’ll go with you,” said a woman ten years younger but burdened with health issues.

“I’d take morphine,” said a lithe man who spent an hour a day in our gym.

We were interrupted by the EMT’s, wheeling the poor woman’s husband through the lobby. He looked confused, but not upset. His wife’s body was to the right of the entrance door, a sheet covering her, but he just stared blankly ahead.

“Why can’t they take her body away?” I asked. It seemed so undignified.

“They have to investigate first,” said the handyman.

Soon conversations in the lobby drifted to the usual chit-chat between neighbors. Is it cold outside…Is the laundry room crowded? Life was beginning to return to normal. I was beginning to think our building was jinxed: every ten years or so, something unthinkable happened. In 1985 our upstairs neighbor Leon Klinghoffer was thrown overboard by Palestinian terrorists in the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Laura. In 1996 Abe Lebewhol, owner of the Second Avenue Deli—who lived in the building with his wife and donated his famous chopped liver for our annual holiday parties—was murdered in an attempted robbery; he’d survived the Holocaust but not a routine trip to make a bank deposit.

But no, my building wasn’t ill-fated; today’s tragedy was a microcosm for the inexplicable and seemingly random series of isolated calamities. Some received national—even global—attention. Others didn’t go beyond one’s own front yard.

I wanted to weep for the old woman with no one to mourn her. My own mother had died just six months ago. Her caretaker had gone to the next room to cook dinner, and in those ten minutes my mother fell—she broke her hip and spent her last two years of life completely bedridden with advanced dementia. If my mother could have, she might have jumped out a window. At times, if I could have, I would have given her extra morphine to quicken the painful, interminable, humiliating end.

I wanted to cry out and publicize this unknown woman’s death—not even a name, but an apartment number, 18G—and inform the entire nation that we’ve lost our way in our care for the elderly.

Later that afternoon, the woman’s body was finally removed. The police department had only one truck to pick up bodies, and they “rounded them all up” at once, starting at 6 P.M. My building staff washed down the sidewalk with soapy water. The staff changed shifts. Building tenants who arrived home later that night, from errands and movies and visits with friends, might notice an odd fact: only a portion of our building’s sidewalk was wet, as if it had rained in only one isolated spot. They might pause and shrug, and then continue their lives without a clue that anything macabre might have occurred. Nothing more, perhaps, than a geological aberration.
 

Candy Schulman’s essays have been widely published including Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Lost and Found, Stories from New York, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Newsweek, The Washington Post, Travel & Leisure, Glamour, Parents. She is a creative writing professor at The New School.

John was with another guy. We inched closer to them, as star-struck as those legendary teenage girls who screamed whenever they heard the Beatles sing.

“Hullo,” John said, and it would be the first and last word I would hear him utter. He playfully popped his hat on top of my head.

“Where do you girls live?” asked John’s buddy.

Somehow the four of us started walking together, toward my fifth-floor walk-up on Eighth Street.

“Want to come up?” Susan asked them.

I stared at her in awe and shock. She lived back across the park, in a tiny studio on Sullivan Street, but I shared a two-bedroom with an NYU psychology student. In a half hour I was due at NYU, where I was studying for a Master’s Degree in the evenings.

The next thing I knew, I was unlocking the black gate to ascend above Eli Wilentz’s Eighth Street Bookshop—my landlord, the infamous bookstore where I converted checks into cash in the days before ATMs, the hip gathering place of poets and artists with a customer base of literary superstars: Auden, Cummings, Moore, Schwartz, Kerouac, Ginsberg.

We were actually climbing the creaky winding staircases to the top floor—with John Lennon! As soon as we were inside my apartment—which cost me a hundred and sixty-two dollars and fifty cents a month and had a working fireplace—John’s buddy was all over Susan. She was petite to the point of looking frail, but she was no pushover. Her liaisons with men, women, and combinations were far more brazen and widespread than mine, yet she kept pushing him away. I smiled wanly at John, sitting in my very own living room whose design scheme could only be described as Post-College Dorm. He was so stoned he was nodding off. He was devastated by his break-up with Yoko. How did I know this? I just did. Poor lonely John.

I was twenty years old and having problems with my own boyfriend, a college crush turned lover, who was in medical school in Guadalajara. Although I wanted to marry him, he’d rebuffed my offer to come live with him in Mexico, leaving me alone and lonely on Eighth Street. Most nights my roommate’s boyfriend stayed over, a drummer who earned his living selling cocaine and listened to Coltrane while I was trying to study Abnormal Psychology for grad school. Susan had an on-again off-again boyfriend who lived in Alphabet City in an era that made Rent look tame.

It would be years before Nixon would resign and the Vietnam War would end. The Beatles had once seemed counterculture, but their rebellious image waned in comparison to the groups that came after them. It’s hard to believe that their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show was so revolutionary. They were wearing ties! And yes, I screamed into the TV when they sang, “All My Loving.”

Susan was still trying to fend off John’s aggressive buddy. There I was, at what seemed like a critical juncture in my young life. We were either going to sleep with John and his buddy (whose name we never knew), or we were going to throw them out.

Susan threw them out.

I stared at her incredulously. Even though I don’t know what I would have done if we’d allowed them to stay. Even though I doubted that John was capable of doing anything much that night—except passing out.

John’s buddy shrugged, and he guided a wobbly John out the door.

What were we thinking?

“Wait. Your hat,” I managed to say, and placed it back on his head.

What was I thinking?

John nodded, smiling.

Then they were gone.

“What’re we…crazy?” I said to Susan. “Do you know who we just asked to leave? John Lennon!”

Susan could have taught a Ph.D. level course in one-night stands, but why did she decide to be moral that night? “His friend was a pig,” she said, and then she suddenly started having misgivings.

We raced back down the five flights of stairs and into Washington Square Park…searching…searching. No John. No hat. Not on Sixth Avenue. Nowhere Man.

Despite the fact that I was a shy, unadventurous girl, I’ve had regrets about the way that evening turned out. John and Yoko would soon make up, but they would not live happily ever after. My boyfriend would dump me, catapulting me into an overwrought period of despair, where I often found solace in Beatles songs: I’ll pretend that I’m kissin’/The lips I am missin’….And when jobs took us in different directions, I would lose touch with Susan and never see her again.

In the years that passed, I enjoyed telling my John Lennon story repeatedly to friends and family. People loved hearing it, and I had my fifteen minutes of fame. You met John Lennon? they gawked. He was in your apartment…and you let him go?

Sometimes I even joked about my story, saying that if I hadn’t sent John on his way, I might have been Sean’s mother. I’ve even told the story to my teenage daughter, focusing on the hat part and editing out sections leading to the possibility of sex with strangers.

After John was killed, I stood alongside thousands of mourners in Central Park in what is now Strawberry Fields. I cried, and sang, “Imagine.” It took many years before I was able to re-enact my John Lennon story.

I’ve often wondered: if John had stayed that night, would my life have been different? Or would my John Lennon story have been better? I’m glad, even relieved, that our brief encounter ended in a pure, innocent way. Although I wish I’d kept his hat.

The End

Candy Schulman’s essays have appeared in Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and many other publications.

Not since my pregnancy have so many people elevated a distended part of my body to public discourse. My neoprene knee stabilizer invited countless questions and unsolicited advice from friends and strangers in Greenwich Village, where I live, on the #6 train, and in the physical therapist’s office in Union Square—where I shared stories about doctors and joint recovery with patients my parents’ age.

Here’s the short version of my knee injury: I’d planned to spend two weeks vacation in a bucolic rural setting 400 miles from the city. After an hour of tennis, my knee mysteriously became swollen beyond recognition, and I ended up trading my sun visor for dark basement X-ray units of the local hospital. Limping my way through vacation, I paused every few hours to ice my grotesquely engorged right knee.

I suffered through everyone’s knee stories, including assorted cures: from P.T. to reflexology. We had all become our parents, talking unabashedly about our aching joints—not over bridge games, but while pairing blush wines with hummus and Mediterranean olives. Of course I also endured everyone’s rotator cuff, lumbar, cervical, and feet tribulations—including my husband’s reiteration of his year-long struggle with plantar fasciitis. By the time we reached dessert, we were talking orthotics.

So began my search for a doctor in today’s labyrinth of managed care restrictions and pre-certification numbers, slick doctor web sites, and internet blogs on knee treatment disasters. Years ago, when I ruptured a disc in a dance class, I could choose any doctor I wanted. I didn’t like the arrogant young surgeon who immediately pronounced I’d need surgery. I spent 30 days in traction as a conservative approach before capitulating to the surgeon’s scalpel. I was cured immediately; he had that I-told-you-so look my mother used to use; soon after he became famous for saving a celebrity’s back after a car crash. “That’s my surgeon!” I’d brag, pointing to him on TV.

Just as everyone has a knee story, everyone has a knee doctor they either love or hate. I made two lists, researching only the ones with “love” after their recommendations. Googling the net, plugging names into my insurance web site, narrowing down possibilities based on medical school qualifications and residency training. The way some of my friends searched for soul mates on the web, I was trying to find a doctor match. One had impressive credentials, but he was as young as my back surgeon had been—and I had grown much older. Could I trust my knee with someone who hadn’t even been born when President Kennedy was getting back injections?

My first blind doctor date was a basketball player on the west side. There had only been a “head shot” on his web site, but I shouldn’t have been so surprised how tall he was. College team photos hung on his office wall next to his residency orthopedic training.

“You ever been scoped?” he asked.

“No,” I said. At least I didn’t think so.

In five minutes he said, “We’re looking at arthroscopic surgery.” And on the white paper used to cover the exam table, he created an original rendering of my alleged torn cartilage, illustrating which part he would cut away. My back surgeon had also drawn pictures of my ruptured disc. Perhaps medical school ended their art careers.

“We do it on Friday, you’re back at work on Monday,” said the basketball player artiste, handing me a prescription for an MRI.

More research to find an open MRI on my insurance plan and a second opinion doctor. My knee injury was now my career. I spent sleepless nights poring over KneeHipPain.com.

The basketball player called me at 8 a.m. “Surgery,” said he. “This is what you want to hear. I can repair it. I’ll put Novocain into your knee. It’s like going to the dentist.”

I needed a Valium just to schedule a dental appointment.

“The tissue is not functioning and cannot repair itself,” he insisted. “You have a big tear in the medial meniscus.”

“How big?”

“Big. We do it on Friday, you’re back at work on Monday.”

The second opinion: a handsome child doctor told me arthritis was my real problem, and we needed to treat that. “You may not be a candidate for surgery,” he said, adding with a smile, “If I operated on everyone who walked in here with a torn cartilage, I could retire in three years.” He explained that my knee was swollen because it “wasn’t happy,” and he drained it with a needle, insisting on showing me the vials of yellow fluid. “Fifty cc’s!” he said enthusiastically. “Ten times normal.”

I visited six doctors, was told to put orthotics in my shoes, change my sneakers, get “scoped,” strengthen my quads, stretch my hamstrings, switch to clay tennis courts, give up tennis, swim but avoid the butterfly, get a steroid injection, take glucosomine and ibuprofen, massage my muscles with Arnica, ice my knee, use heat on my knee, elevate my knee, wear a knee sleeve, not wear a knee sleeve, avoid stairs, avoid doctors. And of course I kept bumping into other knee sufferers, like the colleague in the dressing room of Banana Republic, once crippled with knee pain, yet she ignored five of New York’s top orthopedic surgeons, went for rigorous P.T., and was absolutely fine. “But what do you think of this dress?” she inquired, before telling the tailor to shorten it just above her knee.

I went home and did what any confused, aching joint patient should do: opened a bottle of wine and made sure to elevate my knee by my third glass…and contemplate acupuncture.

I was born in this city and always assumed I’d grow old here. Little did I know I’d experience a preview of what it’s like to be a frail New Yorker until after my arthroscopic surgery, when I had to navigate these fast-paced streets with a swollen knee, a limp, and a cane. My injury and surgery had transformed me from a speed walker racing to work into a woman patiently waiting for the bus driver to lower the entrance steps…only to feel on display to the impatient travelers on line behind me as I slowly ascended.

What a rush I’d always been in before! Running for traffic lights, dashing for the express train lest I have to wait another three minutes, sprinting to the ticket holders’ line so I could secure an aisle seat in the movies.

Now I hobbled. Everyone on these dense Manhattan sidewalks left me behind in the dust, soot, and bus fumes. I was on one of those slow-moving escalator walkways in the airport, but everyone else briskly wheeled their suitcases past me.

I got bumped and pushed, jostled and nearly swept off my one good foot, with mumbled “sorries” or more often no apologies at all. Despite their stereotype, New Yorkers are not rude or uncaring; they’re just in such a rush, unable to slow down, and don’t notice the tortoises slugging behind. I missed countless lights, and while I waited for the traffic to whiz by and the light to turn green, I wondered: What was I losing with all these missed seconds and minutes?

Actually, I began to see new things: the tops of buildings and their unique architectural details, nannies escorting well-groomed children to school, bicycle riders (with and without helmets), flowers painted on taxis, different styles of gardens in front of concrete buildings, and many older city residents with shopping carts, walkers, hunched shoulders, and canes—just like mine.

In spite of my former fast-paced city gait, I (almost) always stopped and helped seniors across the street. “Are you all right now?” I’d inquire, and they’d nod yes, even though I worried that they were too frail to navigate these dangerous streets…vulnerable and alone.

Now I planned my day around my disability. Avoided rush hour subways, feared to walk through throngs of shoppers in Soho on a sunny weekend afternoon, went to restaurants at the unhip hour of 6 p.m. It was an odd dichotomy: I felt as if everyone was staring at me, and at the same time I was invisible—except to the injured and the elderly. We shared park benches and waited for lights to turn green and sometimes even struck up conversations about total joint replacements.

When I threw my cane away and even started jogging to make the light once in awhile, I reminded myself to slow down—life didn’t have to be this fast. There would always be another light, another train, another lingering citizen who was my companion in waiting. I’d take a deep breath and ask if he or she needed assistance in crossing the street, and when a fragile hand extended my way, I took it with a keen understanding, and we both walked slowly across the street while the cars edgily waited to zoom past us.

Candy Schulman’s essays have appeared in many national publications, and she has just completed a memoir. She teaches writing at The New School.

We arrive for our weekly game on Mercer near Houston Street, four players just shy of Social Security—two men and two women, all married, but not to each other. We have a total of seven high-tech racquets and three cans of balls (two new and one used from “who remembers when? But I think they’re still pretty good”). Mike wears a tennis elbow splint on his right forearm, plus two matching knee braces in a highly attractive midnight blue; I wear one tennis elbow band (right arm) and one ankle ace bandage; Bill has an ice pack taped to his left shoulder for the rotator cuff injury that never fully healed; Susan is the only one with no orthopedic devices on any extremity–yet.

We are all equal club players, give or take a few questionable line calls—mostly mediocre, occasionally inspired, never consistent. We have accepted the reality that our inadequate second serves will never improve, and we are no longer embarrassed by a blundering missed overhead—“It went right through the hole in my racquet strings!”

Bill’s strength is an inside-out forehand learned from an over-the-hill tour player turned resort-pro at Hilton Head Island. My asset is that I have connections with the best physical therapist in town—just a jog away in Union Square—and can get an appointment at the flick of a cell phone. Susan’s secret strategy is to lob over everyone’s head–frustrating moon balls, and who cares if they call her a dinker? She wins more than she loses. Mike has a sheepish secret: back in his early twenties, he’d poked fun of those splint-adorned and boisterous “A.K.’s” who limped around the next court; now he is one.

We play “first one in.” Bill and I win the first game 40-love. We do not switch sides, just pause for a water break.

“Did you hear Jeff’s having a knee replacement?” says Bill.

“No, it’s a hip replacement,” insists Mike.

Bill shrugs, pops three Advil with a chaser of kiwi-strawberry Vitamin Water.

It’s Susan’s turn to serve. First one in, double fault, wide serve moving me way off court, weak return, a killer net winner that’s so good it surprises her, never admitting she’d just stuck her racquet out, for once being in the right time and place. Timing’s everything, from real estate and the stock market to backhand volleys.

“Great shot,” says her partner.

“Just lucky,” says Bill.

“Thirty-fifteen,” Mike announces, assuming the serve position.

“No, it’s fifteen-thirty,” Bill corrects.

Mike shakes his head. “Can’t be, we won the first point, double faulted, then we just got a winner.”

“Whatever,” Bill says, scowling, re-adjusting the strings on his racquet the way he’s seen the pros during Grand Slams.

Nobody holds serve in the first six games. Another water break.

“Did you watch the French Open?” asks Susan.

“My wife refuses to support anything French these days,” says Mike. “I Tivo’d it and watched it secretly when she was at Pilates.”

“Do you think Serena is on steroids?” asks Susan.

“I’d trade my Jell-O arms for hers anytime,” I say.

“I don’t know half the players anymore,” says Bill.

“Rod Laver…now there was a tennis player,” Mike says dreamily.

“I thought Lendl had sexy legs,” admits Susan.

“Let’s play already,” I say.

“What’s the score again?” asks Mike.

“Four games to three,” says Bill.

“Impossible, we played six games total,” I say.

We re-enact who served when, who won, and then debate if it’s four-two or three-all. Nobody can agree, so we just call it a tie and resume play.

Mike has been known to stop giving his opponents generous line calls when he’s down. Susan blames losses on either the net (too high…too low), her racquet, or the fight she had last night with her husband. We all have tickets to the U.S. Open, where we’ll buy enough hats and T-shirts for next year’s mixed doubles wardrobe.

We play three sets, argue a little more about the score, and shake hands. “Thank you”…“Great game.” Limping off the court, we avoid exchanging glances with the twentysomethings on the next court. Bill claims he heard one of those young guys muttering “A.K.” as they crossed their back court, unhurried, interrupting their play, but no one else can substantiate it. As soon as Susan finds her glasses and Mike finds his car keys, we can go home. On the way out, we pause to see one of the twentysomethings attempt a winner at net, but it sails way long.

“Just unlucky,” Mike mutters, throwing his oversized U.S. Open bag over his shoulder, hoping he’s said it loud enough for those upstarts to hear.

“Youth may have energy, but we have experience and wisdom,” I say, forgetting where my car is parked—but just momentarily.

A decade later, after my professional mentor dies in the Village Nursing Home, I help his sister-in-law close up his Flatiron apartment. I take a few books and his manual typewriter as mementos of the man who influenced my life as an aspiring New York writer. His family wants the piano to have a good home, I have a six-year-old daughter (and a bigger apartment). My mother says she must study music. The piano movers can transport it to my 14th floor Greenwich Village apartment for less than the cost of a trendy restaurant meal. In twenty-four hours, the piano moves in.

My daughter regards it skeptically. “I want to learn the violin,” she says.

“We have a piano,” I enthuse, recalling sixth grade, after being asked to select an instrument to learn. I listed drums first, trumpet second. My mother staunchly shook her head and said, “We have a clarinet and a saxophone–pick one.” My brothers’ hand-me-downs. After a year of suffering broken reeds, I dropped out of orchestra.

“Violins sound beautiful,” my daughter insists.

Not badly played violins, I want to say, but instead I negotiate. “Try the piano first. Later you can learn the violin.”

Within days she masters “Doe a Dear” and “Frere Jacques.” Amy can’t be in the same room as the piano, which is way-off-key, without setting her magic marker-stained fingers on the ivories. I increase our household supply of ibuprofen. It will get better when we get a tuner…a teacher…a decade of practice.

I find a tuner through a friend, who comes from good stock: her grandfather played in the Philharmonic, and she recommends a tuner who has melodiously filled her parents’ Upper West Side home for twenty-five years. He wants details about alternative side of the street parking before driving down from Washington Heights. He’s quite old, late eighties perhaps, and pulls his tools on a luggage wheeler. He asks me to feed the meter and make him lunch.

“This piano needs a lot of work,” he says, his estimate catapulting from the initial $200 to at least triple the amount.

“How did you get into the tuning business?” I inquire.

“I was in furniture, but I wanted a trade,” he says. “Learned pianos fifty-five years ago, and I’ve been happy ever since.” He bites into my ham sandwich. “I’m a haiku poet. I’ll bring you some poems when I come back.”

My husband insists we get a second opinion, even though this is not surgery. The next tuner is an artist who learned to tune, she says, “when I got bored my first year in college.” She used to play but she sold her piano after a divorce. Now she tunes pianos for NYU’s music department. “I need to pull the action out, tighten all the screws and hammers, work on the regulation, but we’ll see if the keys need leveling, probably not. And your first tuner left the top octave untuned! That’s just odd–unless he had to be at Carnegie Hall at four o’clock….”

“I think the meter had just run out,” I say.

Next week she takes apart my piano and attacks it with a screwdriver and a plier, talking and groaning out loud. “Don’t mind me if I cuss. Oh! There was a mouse in here. Not dead. Mice love pianos. They eat the felt on the pads.” She tells me to make sure the piano gets enough humidity–to prevent further work if the wood dries out. “Where should I put this?” She drops a blackened paper towel in my sink. “It’s full of mouse poo.”

She tunes. “It’s a good thing you did all this work, because if your daughter doesn’t take to it, you can now sell the piano for $2000 easy. But even if she quits, keep the piano. She might want to return to it at 7…or 10.”

Before Amy can quit her lessons, I must find a teacher. Most of them are booked, as they can teach only between four and six PM after school. After innumerable rejections, one says she can switch someone around and teach Amy at 8:30 AM on Saturdays.

I jump at it, even though I don’t like to listen to scales before I’ve had two cups of strong coffee. But first I politely write to my neighbors on both sides and underneath us if they would have any objection to Amy taking lessons so early on a weekend; they are surprisingly encouraging. Let the lessons begin!

The teacher hoists Amy up on two telephone books to position her little body at the piano. She awards Good Job stickers and writes musical directions inside the shapes of little drawings of lambs. I purchase a Suzuki CD and must be present at lessons so we can practice. A child no longer takes lessons; these days the family learns together. Amy is a quicker study than I. She can find all the C’s, D’s and F’s across the keyboard. She adds “Mississippi Hot Dog” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb” to her repertoire.

I call my mother, as Amy’s not-so-delicate fingers pound the keyboard. “Gentle, gentle,” I keep saying. “Don’t bang.”

“I’m not banging!” she yells. “I’m playing.”

I hold the phone toward the keyboard, and let Mom listen to the three thousandth “Mississippi Hot Dog”–this was her idea, after all. Now I know why for the past six years, when we visited her in Florida and Amy wanted to play her organ, Mom would surreptitiously pull the plug and claim, “It’s broken.”

The past and the future merge in my apartment. I thank my writing mentor for giving me so much over the years, above and beyond a piano; hearing music emanate from his piano makes him feel alive to me. The piano has become a part of our family: sometimes loud and opinionated, sometimes still and contemplative…a forceful voice that has interrupted our dinner conversations and changed us all. I have become quite fond of it–even if my neighbors have not–accepting its eccentricities as though it were a member of the family.

One night the couple in 14D invite us in to hear their guest, a concert pianist, in their living room. Tuddy has Parkinson’s, but he used to play. Now he listens from a wheelchair as a young Japanese man (who has a day job on Wall Street) plays Chopin. Amy seems more passionate about the Veniero’s pastries Tuddy’s wife is getting ready to serve than the superlative concert she’s just heard. After we applaud, I ask him if his mother made him practice.

“I hated practicing. My mother nagged,” he confessed. “Until I was eighteen. Then I practice on my own.”

Only 11 years to go.

I know that Amy’s practicing will benefit us all…eventually. But why does she so eagerly practice at 7 AM?

Seven-fifteen, more “Mississippi Hot Dog.” On the way to school an hour later, she says, “When can I learn the violin?”

“Later,” I say. And we harmonize “Twinkle Twinkle” all the way to the bus stop. People on Third Avenue, rushing to work, pause for a moment to offer a few smiles. We bow, and explain that we have to be at Carnegie Hall by four o’clock.

# # #

It takes only three years of nudging before Amy practices without my nagging (usually).

Her dentist is a block away from Steinway Hall, and while the fluoride settles on her teeth, we always stop in, feeling underdressed but surprisingly encouraged by the sales staff to go in the back room and play. It’s amazing how much better Amy sounds on a $70,000 grand piano. She hasn’t made it to Carnegie Hall but she played “Rondo” by Mozart in a recital much farther uptown at the Jewish Home for the Aged. She taught herself to play “God Bless America” for a school presentation on Irving Berlin, and when she jazzily plays “Satin Doll” for my friends, they begin to place dollar bills on top of the piano.

A dedicated young pianist but certainly not a prodigy. I encourage her to excel in school so that she can secure a reliable day job. If you ask her what she wants to be when she grows up, she quickly responds, “A professional soccer player.”

Miraculously, our neighbors have complained only once. The doorman said the woman who recently moved in above me didn’t like it when Amy practiced before 8AM Sunday morning. This woman also has a piano, and she sometimes plays the same songs as Amy; perhaps she’s just jealous that Amy’s making faster progress at a younger age.

I love hearing Amy practice now, but this year she started studying the clarinet in school. The instrument squeaks a lot when she blows into it, making high-pitched shrill sounds that cause the hairs on my arms to stand up, and she’s been playing the same song for four months. She has no interest in the violin, but I distract her whenever we see a set of drums.

“Some people think he’s dangerous,” says my friend Anne, another mother and the old man’s neighbor. “But he likes to come to the park and be around children. He lost his wife two years ago, and he’s been devastated.”

My mother spots an opportunity. Even though the man has come to the park to be cheered by children, my mother is hoping he’s ready to meet an octogenarian who is fit, far from feeble, and alone.

“He seems awfully nice,” she tells me later, back in my apartment.

I thought his hair looked greasy and his teeth were in bad shape. “My friend says he’s a very sweet man,” I say.

“I’d like to meet him,” says Mother. “I miss companionship, you know.”

For forty-nine years she was with my father; after his death she spent the next decade living with a man who turned her into a lovesick teenager with mushy cards and flowers. A year after his death, Mother is unsatisfied attending the ballet with groups of women; she’s always preferred the company of men–from selecting golf foursomes to what she now calls “companions.”

I call Anne, who lives around the corner from me in Greenwich Village. This is going to sound odd, I apologize, but my mother wants to meet that old man in Washington Square Park.

“Mr. Meltzer?” Anne is slightly amused. “At least I think that’s his name. I called him Ned for a long time. I can’t always understand him. He doesn’t hear well.”

“Neither does my mother,” I say. “How can I get in touch with Ned? Or whatever his name is?”

“He lives on the third floor. I’m almost positive his name is Meltzer.”

“I’ll write him a note,” I say. “The doorman is sure to know who he is.”

That night, as Mother reads a book she’s brought on meditation (ever since she saw the Dali Llama she claims, “Meditation can cure lots of things”), I struggle with a letter to Mr. Meltzer:

My mother, Sylvia, and I enjoyed meeting you in Washington Square Park. She’s visiting from Florida. She used to live on Fifth Avenue and East 10th Street. She enjoyed talking to you and was wondering if you’d like to–get together? Talk? Go to the movies? Date?… She said she would enjoy your company.

I feel foolish, but I prod on. He lives in New York and Florida, like my mother–they have a lot in common already!–I list both phone numbers. “Have a nice day,” I sign off cheerfully.

There was a time when my mother and I barely spoke, when I was a teenager and she was in menopause. Now I am her matchmaker. On the way to Gristede’s to buy dinner, I leave the note with Mr. Meltzer’s doorman.

Every morning Mother soaks her ginger crystals in water to remove the excess sugar, repeating how marvelous ginger is for digestion. She swallows a dozen vitamin pills, including gingko. Holding up the pill, she says, “It’s for memory–that is, if I remember to take it!”

She laughs. I hide in the corner of my kitchen, surreptitiously smearing butter on my toast as if inhaling some illegal drug.

“I never eat butter,” Mother says. “You shouldn’t either. Haven’t you put on a few pounds?”

She points to my multi-vitamin bottle, which I keep on an open shelf so I don’t forget (I need gingko, too). “Vitamins should always be kept in cool dark places.”

She removes the now sugar-free ginger crystals from the glass of water. I remember feeling unnerved when I saw my grandmother’s false teeth in a glass, which she always left out on display; thanks to dental implants, Mother still has teeth. It’s a new world. I have a mother who sits with me at my computer as I retrieve weather forecasts, stock prices, and e-mails. Yet she speaks with regret about the world gone by.

“We all lived close to each other,” she says. “Every Sunday we had dinner with Aunt Mimi in Bayside.”

She lives thirty miles from her grown grandchildren in Florida, yet they see her only on holidays.

“Maybe it would be better if you moved closer to them. That way you could see them more,” I say, tearfully thinking of my mother eating dinner alone on Sundays.

“They have their own lives. And I have mine. I can’t make new friends at my age.”

But what about Mr. Meltzer? He hasn’t called. I think of friends who tell me how hard it is to meet available men in this town.

“It must be difficult to meet male companions,” I say.

“You mean ones who are walking and above ground?” Mother nods.

“Maybe you should look for younger ones,” I suggest.

“They want younger women….Have you heard this joke? This 90-year-old man marries a 20-year-old woman, and he tells her, ‘No sex.’ So they take separate bedrooms, but every night he crawls into bed with her and has sex. Finally she says, ‘I thought you said no sex.’ And he says, ‘Oh…was I here before?’”

Mother laughs, I politely smile. I glance at the phone. What must he have thought when he read my match-making letter? I haven’t told Mother about dropping off the note. I don’t want her to be disappointed.

She has been trying to buy the studio apartment next door to mine, even though the owners aren’t ready to sell. “Move to Florida,” she tells them while waiting for the elevator. “You’ll love it there!” She yearns for the security of being near me, of returning to Greenwich Village where she once rode around the streets on her bicycle and hit tennis balls against a wall behind P.S. 41. “If I ever get my hands on that apartment,” she says, “it’ll be my old age home.”

She sighs. I’ve been spoiled all these years with my strong-willed, strong-bodied mother, racing from The Met to The Modern to Lincoln Center. I’ve always had difficulty keeping up with her energy, but lately when we walk together on crowded Manhattan streets, I must decrease my pace, reminding myself to back up into first gear. I’m used to chasing after my five-year-old daughter, who sprints to every corner; it’s a race I always lose.

Now Mother lags behind me, as she once used to when I was a child. When she was tireless. After an afternoon gallivanting around the city, she needs to nap. I peek in on her, in the rocker where I once nursed my infant daughter. The meditation book is open, upside down, on her lap, and her mouth is agape. I can see every bone in her face and she suddenly looks much older in sleep. Tiptoing inside, I listen for her breathing and am relieved to hear the regular rhythm. I look to the phone, wondering why Mr. Meltzer never called. And I can’t help but to wonder who we might meet in the Washington Square playground tomorrow?