I recall being shocked the first time I heard someone call Shea Stadium a shithole. He was a stranger, a gray-haired man in a mesh Mets cap, missing several bicuspids and an incisor. I was a wee boy walking across the Roosevelt Avenue Bridge, on my way to Shea from College Point Boulevard, where my father had parked our car. Above us rumbled the elevated no. 7 Redbird subway cars. Below us the pea-green creek smelled like a backed-up toilet. And for as far as I could see, automobiles were piled in junkyards that seemed to go on forever along Willets Point. To me, a kid growing up in a benign town outside the city, this was urban decay witnessed firsthand. It was truly foreign, something raw and not sanitized in every way. But in no way did I judge it ugly or worthless. It was what it was. I wasn’t exactly sure then what shithole meant, though I had an idea, but I was certain Shea Stadium wasn’t one. This was the very late 1970s.

May 13, 2008: I attend a game with my two brothers and my nephew. The lowly Washington Nationals are in town. I bring along my digital camera. Who knows if I’ll get back to Shea this year. Might as well take some photos of the broken-down place before it’s gone. My brothers and nephew drive in from the suburbs. I take the no. 7 from Manhattan and get to Shea early. Almost there, I have an excellent view of a middle-aged Big-League ballpark lit up by a setting New York sun on a pleasant spring evening. I wish I’d been ready to take a photo from the subway car.

Before the game I walk around Shea alone. Comparing it to the new stadium under construction next door, I rediscover just how huge Shea is. In recent years my interest in baseball and spectator sports in general has waned considerably and I’ve visited Flushing less and less. I’d forgotten the sheer immensity of the structure. Shea’s a giant that dwarfs its replacement, the almost-finished Citi Field. I walk to the back of the parking lot — to an outer fence — in order to get a full shot of royal-blue Shea, which is still surrounded on one side by those car-repair shops and junkyards. For the time being anyhow.

Plans are in the works, I understand, to raze buildings, evict owners, revitalize the area for the greater good; a lot of people seem okay with the idea. No one powerful puts up too big a fuss about this dusty corner of the city. People in the city seem less capable of making a big fuss these days but there is resistance. Things change. Things always change. And so I take pictures of what’s here while I still can. Maybe I’ll get back to Shea one more time this season; maybe I won’t.

August 8, 2008: I’m going to the game tonight with my father (in his seventies now), a few siblings, and a friend. Circumstances dictate that I’m near my hometown on game day, and I’ve made plans to drive to the game with my father. My parents still live in the house I grew up in; driving in with him will be the ultimate in personal nostalgia.

My father tells me Shea Stadium parking will be a mess – with all that construction going on; we’ll park in a municipal lot in Flushing. He knows where it is and how to get there. From there we’ll walk to the game. I don’t protest. In fact, I welcome it. It’ll be like old times – a bonus. We race in and my father finds his muni lot like a pro. It’s east of Main Street; we start walking toward College Point Boulevard.

I hadn’t been in Flushing proper in years. I’ve yet to visit an Asian city but Flushing feels like one – not merely an Asian section of New York. There was a time when it would have been quite dangerous to walk these streets at night, which we’ll do later this evening. But the transformation, well, it’s amazin’ – to use a popular Met adjective, in its correct abbreviated form. I’d heard about what’s been going on in Flushing but I hadn’t paid close attention. The Korean and Chinese communities have transformed it. Flushing is vibrant now – more so than it was the last time I was here, half a dozen or so years ago. The streets are full of energy and life tonight. How did I miss the story of this place and what its people have done with it? It’s quite different from what might happen to Willets Point and also to Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn. I think to myself: it wouldn’t be all that bad to live here, on an upper floor, a foreigner in an Asian city, with a full view of Citi Field — opening spring 2009.

We walk down College Point Boulevard and make a right on Roosevelt Avenue. I recall that there was a dingy gas station on this corner once. It’s gone. Something will replace it soon enough; preparations are under way – heavy equipment in place. There is a lot of construction going on in Flushing at the moment. There will be something built on this spot soon enough.

I immediately recognize the path to the Roosevelt Avenue Bridge but everything around it seems different. Everything behind us in Flushing has changed or is changing. I see the no. 7 line ahead of us. Above it is yet another multi-story building under construction.

What in the world is being built here — in this improving but still grim part of Flushing?

There is a temporary banner affixed to the building but I cannot read it. In a matter of minutes, I’ll see that many of the junkyards on Willets Point are already gone; reeds have been allowed to grow very high and very thick and take over naturally. But now I’m reading a sign on a very tall building under construction next to the noisy no. 7 subway line above Roosevelt Avenue.

It reads: LUXURY CONDOS FOR SALE.

Summer’s end: Labor Day weekend is coming fast, and it’s very unlikely I’ll get back to Shea this season. So I guess I’ve said my goodbye to the not-so-old park and days spent there. Goodbye to loud planes overhead. Goodbye to mostly mediocre baseball. Goodbye to a garish blue exterior and bright orange seats. Goodbye to awful food and DiamondVision and the Magic Top Hat with the Big Apple that pops out with every Met home run. Goodbye to Loge seating and goodbye to Mezzanine and Upper Level. Goodbye to an era.

The Mets old home, a little rusty. (Photo: Kevin Nolan)

Kevin Nolan is a writer living in New York City.

Pixie was bred for the dog-show circuit but didn’t make the cut. And so my wife and I took ownership of this mite of a dog, now banished to household-pet status. Pixie, apparently, doesn’t have the desired long neck of a show dog and she is far too small to compete. The fact that Pixie is too small is indisputable and immediately obvious to breeder and non-breeder alike: she’s the size of a well-fed guinea pig.

She’s so tiny it can be visually jarring, even to me at times. I never thought I’d own a dog this small–a pocket dog, a frou-frou dog, whatever you want to call it. I always thought that when I got around to owning a dog I’d get, well, a bigger breed: a retriever, a shepherd, something like that. But I’ve grown to appreciate little dogs, and my wife and I have slowly become versions of a ghastly Park Slope stereotype: anthropomorphizing pet owners.

In Park Slope everyone seems to have a dog or a small child, or both. This is the convention. My wife jokes about a business plan to rent children and dogs, at an hourly rate, like Zipcars, to people entering Prospect Park. Corporate mission: to provide childless or pet-less customers with the sense that they fit in, momentarily, when walking around the lake, the carousel or when in the Long Meadow. (Actually, I’ve learned there already exists, elsewhere in America, pet-rental businesses, but my wife’s “plan” takes it one step further.)

Like many pet owners, we have numerous nicknames for our dog, most known only to us. But on the street and when in Prospect Park, I do shorten Pixie’s name. This way I avoid calling out, “Come Pixie! Come Pixie!” and retain a modicum of masculinity. Instead I call out “Pix, Pix, Pix,” which might remind New Yorkers of a certain age of an after-school video-game show on WPIX television in the 1980s.

Soon after getting Pix as a one-year-old, I noticed a fringe benefit, which I guiltily reported to my wife: young women love the dog. Invariably, she’s the “cutest thing” they’ve ever seen; they stop and talk to me and, curiously, to Pix, who loves people if not other dogs and creatures (which I’ll get to). I now have a greater appreciation for the ploy of using cute pets or children to attract the opposite sex. Women ask about Pix’s breed and about Pix herself. She’s a superstar, though she doesn’t know it. Often they ask for her age. Once in response to this question, I said Pix is four, and a woman asked, “Four months?” “No,” I said, “Four years.”

See: thimble-sized Pix is regularly mistaken for a puppy, though she is several years into adulthood. And because she has a beard, mustache, and wiry eyebrows, she is also often mistaken for being male. She is judged by her appearance. Though, of course, what something appears to be isn’t necessarily what it is.

We live in the part of the Slope where Pete Hamill grew up. That Park Slope, which Hamill describes in his very good 1994 memoir A Drinking Life, is nothing like today’s long-gentrified “South” Slope. Undoubtedly, there were dogs in his Park Slope, though not very many Pixies, I’m guessing. His working-class Park Slope no longer exists. Nevertheless, if one looks closely, one can still see or hear, well, what’s left of those days. One can pick out a face or two or five; that is, one can guess who has, more than likely, been here since before double-decker tourist buses were a common sight on Prospect Park West (Ninth Avenue).

Pete Hamill’s old haunt is now one of the “top 10 neighborhoods” in America, according to the American Planning Association (whatever that is). And those old brownstones, they go for a few million apiece now–too pricey for me though not for everyone, apparently.

And so it is on these streets, newly paved with gold, that I walk a dog the size of an overgrown squirrel. Pix is painfully aware (I’m guessing) of how small and vulnerable she is. I think this because she lashes out in fear at every dog or dog-like creature that crosses her path.

Rottweiler, dingo, Grizzly: it doesn’t matter.

We’ve tried a number of training techniques to get her to stop doing this. She is much better than she was when we first adopted her, but she still lashes out on occasion. As a result, she has a bit of a rep in the neighborhood. A fellow dog owner once called Pix a “little monster.” And I’ve witnessed people crossing the street to avoid her (us, actually). On the positive side, she has gained some serious Park Slope street cred.

One night I walked by a group of teenagers hanging out in the park (boys and girls, blacks, whites, Asians–a multicultural teen gang suitable for Park Slope). They were very interested in the Pix. One young man asked if he might pet her. Sure, I said. As he bent over to pet her, another dog and its owner had the temerity to walk in Pix’s general vicinity. Pix leapt at the dog, a retriever, barking and showing her rice-sized teeth; instinctively, I yanked her little body back, but Pix kept at it. I ordered her to stop, which she disregarded until the other dog was at a safe distance. The other dog owner had moved quickly along, but his dog had all but ignored the pipsqueak “threatening” it. The kids, meanwhile, howled and shouted in approval at Pix’s bad behavior. One asked her name. I told him. “Oh man,” he said, laughing. “You shoulda called her Massacre!”

Well, Pix by any other name still has the weight of the world on her little shoulders. I can see it in her beady eyes. What’s she thinking? What would she say if she could speak? What do we make of these unknowable, odd creatures–of dogs?

Man’s relationship with dogs is well-trod writer territory. I’m thinking of Thomas Mann and his German shorthaired pointer and of his struggle to understand Bashan. And I’m thinking of Beckett and his Kerry Blue Terrier, the one he mourned for and refers to, supposedly, in “Krapp’s Last Tape.” There’s A.A. Milne, who wrote about a Pekinese named Bingo (not to mention a Pooh bear). I’m also thinking of E.B. White, who had a dachshund he wrote about, humorously, long after its death. The dachshund was called Fred, which might be a name diametrically opposite to Pixie.

Fred appears in some of White’s famous essays, including “Bedfellows” and “Death of a Pig.” One of my favorite Fred pieces is “Fred on Space,” which appeared in The New Yorker on November 16, 1957. In it White interviews the long-dead Fred, by then a ghost on White’s property in Maine, about the Soviet Union’s recently-launched Sputnik 2, which carried a Laika into space. It’s a very funny imagined exchange; most of it takes the form of a Q&A.

I think a Q&A with Pix might go like this:

Q: Pixie, do you enjoy living in Park Slope?

A: Of course, Park Slope has all that I might possibly need.

Q: But you’re a tiny dog. What could you possibly need?

A: Exactly.

Q: Oh, I see. So that bike lane on Ninth Street…

A: Meaningless. Look at my legs. They’re an inch long. I can’t reach the pedals.

Q: And that new bank…

A: Again, meaningless–unless you plan on opening an account there. I presume we have a bank account.

Q: We do.

A: Good. Restaurants: also meaningless to me. Unless–just once–you’d bring home a doggie bag. But, for the most part, sure, Park Slope is a nice place to live–for a dachshund and, probably, for a human being, too. I listen to what you say to that lady who lives with us. I hear you talk about how expensive it is, but this doesn’t interest me. I’m here for a briefer time than you, and so I’ll leave that money stuff to you. I’ll worry about my next meal; my bed in the living room. Things like that. As for the rest of Park Slope living. Dogs. Don’t like them. Except other dachshunds. Lesbians. Like them. Vegans. Like them–by the way, I don’t think they’d mind if you let me get at one of those squirrels once in a while? Baby strollers: terrified of them. They look like tanks coming at me, especially the ones with those big, knobby tires. I like kids, though–four-legged ones, two-legged ones. As for those free books people leave in boxes on sidewalks and stoops: useless. Instead of books about outmoded philosophies, why don’t they leave something practical–a squeaky toy or a bone? [Big yawn.] Well, nice talking to you. It’s time for my twelfth nap of the day. Gotta go.

Q: Wait, one last thing. Politics. Where do you stand?

A: I stand down here, dummy. At your ankles.

A former trade journalist, Kevin Nolan is finishing a novel.

These books aren’t the sexed-up bodice-rippers with Fabio-like models on the cover. They are mostly chaste stories in which love and loyalty are tested and where good wins out over bad, if not evil, and, in the end, good things happen to good people and more often than not someone gets married, like in the final scene of a fairy tale or Greek comedy.

I try not to be snobbish but I can be at times when it comes to books. And so I started making fun of her during this time for reading her lowly Regency romances–works she called, in mercantile terms, Jane Austen knockoffs. I read aloud the ridiculous prose in a ridiculous, mocking voice. I made fun of the characters’ names and the titles of the books, which were almost without exception preposterous. I made light of the silly and repetitive plots.

To her credit she stood by these books: I enjoy them, she said, I know they’re crap but I’m free to read whatever I want, good or bad, literary or not. Fair enough, I said. She continued to read them daily on her way to work in New York City, on the Long Island Rail Road–light reading, purely fun fluff for a stressful commute.

One morning, though, she called me in a panic. She thought she’d left her Book Gear on the train and feared it was lost.

Book Gear?

“What is Book Gear?” I asked, clueless.

It was a cloth case in which she kept the book she was reading, her monthly commutation ticket, and her work ID. She’d been able to get into her building without her ID that morning but she was worried about her train ticket, which cost a few hundred bucks and which she’d just purchased. In other words, the ticket was at its full and overpriced value.

“Well, you need to call LIRR Lost and Found,” I said. “Maybe someone turned it in.”

Silence.

“Can you call?” she asked.

“You want me to call?”

“Please.”

“But it’s your Book Gear, with your name in it.”

“My name’s not in it.”

“On your ID, on your ticket?”

“My ID only has my picture. No name. And my company name isn’t on it. And I didn’t have a chance to write my name on my ticket. I just bought it.”

This was back in pre-cell-phone New York. What I mean is cell phones existed but they were not as universal and pervasive as they are now and neither of us owned one yet. She said she didn’t want to call because she’d need to call from her desk. And she didn’t want her boss to hear her making a personal call.

“But you’re calling me now?”

Yes, she explained, her boss was away at the moment but she’d be right back. She could make this call quickly.

My wife sat in a small cubicle (a stall, really, the size of a very small closet) and her boss resided on the other side of her wall and was not very accommodating to Calls of a Personal Nature. At the time I had my own private office, another elusive and vanishing American species, and it would be easier for me to make the call.

“Okay, I’ll do it,” I told her. “But how am I going to describe your Book Gear?”

“It’s plaid. And it has my ID and ticket in it. And you can give the name of the book.”

“Okay, what’s the name of the book?”

“A Christmas Treasure.”

I felt my face getting hot and red from embarrassment. “I have to ask for a book called A Christmas Treasure?”

“Please.”

What we do for love.

I look up the number. I’m able to get a woman on the phone. She is very pleasant. I explain that I’ve lost “my Book Gear.” She asks me to give her a general description, which I do (“the outside is plaid”), and she puts me on hold.

Christmas music plays in between Long Island Rail Road announcements.

She comes back on the line. “Okay, I think I found it. There’s a book inside and a train ticket. There’s no name on the ticket. What’s the name of your book?”

My book? My book?

“The name of my book?” I dimly asked.

“Yes, the name of your book. So I can be sure it’s yours.”

Though alone, I still whisper: “A Christmas Treasure.”

“That’s correct,” she announces, as if we’re on a radio call-in quiz show. She informs me of where I can come to pick it up.

“Actually,” I say, “my wife is going to pick it up. It’s hers. The book is hers. I’m calling for her. I’m not even in the city. The book’s not mine. I don’t read that stuff. My wife does.”

“Okay, okay,” she says. “That’s fine. Have a Merry Christmas.”

See for yourself: A Christmas Treasure

Shoppers also purchase and consume food, edible in only the most literal sense of the word, in restaurants that are familiar to them (recognizable logos, slogans, marketing, menus)—only the prices are slightly higher, though still affordable, if not relatively cheap, particularly for those whose salaries are paid in euros or British pounds.

Everything about Herald Square seems crushingly repressive: the mass of people, the tourist mindset, the crass third-rate salesmanship, a deranged universal hope propped up by the existence of easily affordable products in one of the nation’s most expensive cities.

Many see this situation, in Herald Square, in America, as good, I guess, positive, no harm intended. But, at best, I see it as disagreeable. Cheap things made in far-flung nations sold to people whose notions of New York City come from who-knows-where and whose misconceptions are ably promoted by the city’s tourist board. What’s really being sold to them, and to us, is something very crude and senseless.

The only prudent thing to do is vacate the area.

So I often walk along 33rd Street toward the East Side, to escape. On 33rd, among other things, I’m surrounded by readily-available adult entertainment, garage parking, and Irish-style pubs. But it is Empire DVD that catches my attention. It stands in the shadow of the Empire State Building, sandwiched between the entrance to a garage and Empire Erotica, another video store.

What goes on inside Empire DVD is probably pretty mundane. But what’s going on in its window display interests me. Perhaps it’s because Empire is not far from Macy’s with its famous and elaborate window displays, the ones that attract shoppers and tourists, particularly at Christmas and Easter. Yes, perhaps it’s simply the contrast of these two very different window displays, so close in proximity, using techniques that may not be altogether different.

Macy’s window displays promote Lifestyle, I guess, or Fantasies, which can be had for a price, apparently, if one purchases what’s in the window. Recently: clothing by Michael Kors and Cole Haan, on faceless white mannequins.

Complementarily Empire DVD displays, on a thirteen-inch television, on a continuous loop, the DVD Tyson: Man or Machine.

Invariably, when I walk by Empire, there are several men (demographic: age 18 to 45) standing in front of the store, mesmerized by Mike Tyson as he thoroughly thrashes and pummels opponents in matches that probably occurred fifteen to twenty years ago.

One recent afternoon, with the city simmering in an oppressive heat, I saw a middle-aged man standing in front of Empire, sweating profusely but visibly pleased by what he was watching. He was grinning, oddly, almost maniacally, as Tyson (man? machine?) made mincemeat of a boxer I didn’t recognize. The match may well have taken place two blocks from where he was standing, in the Garden, a generation ago, but here it was again, free, in a window, for his viewing pleasure.

I walked to the East Side and back and the man was still in front of Empire watching the DVD, thirty minutes later, a voyeur in 90-degree heat, 80% humidity. He watching Iron Mike, who said he was scared every time he entered the ring. Iron Mike, who said his sensitivity was his greatest weakness. Whose style, he said, was impetuous. Whose defense was impregnable. Who said he was just ferocious. Who once wanted Lennox Lewis’s heart. Who once said, for the then-readily-available cameras, that he wanted to eat Lennox Lewis’s children.

Everybody’s got plans, he’s also said, until they get hit.

A sunny Wednesday in early May: I sit on a bench on the western edge of the park, my back to a dog run, and note the time on the clock above. I’ll allow myself one hour to eat my lunch and do some reading.

I hear dogs and their owners in the dog-run pen behind a low hedgerow. I also see them in front of me, walking by, coming and going, in and out of the pen: small, large, mid-sized, recognizable breeds, mutts.

Also in front of me a throng of office workers. Women in the casual revealing dresses of mid-spring and newly-warm weather. Men in blue oxford shirts, khaki pants, ID cards on lanyards around their necks. In altogether different work uniforms, a group of nurses on the bench opposite me. Next to them: a man and woman too old to cuddle and make out like teenagers cuddle and make out like teenagers. A homeless man sits quietly next to a metal garbage can. A man in a suit napping presumably, head back, sunglasses on. An actor studying two pages of a script: an audition nearby, and soon?

I eat my lunch and look at a new sculpture standing on the park’s main lawn. I overhear an office worker telling another that the sculpture was installed a few weeks ago. It’s a very large stainless steel work. Two full-size trees, inexplicably windblown toward one another, limbs joining. It’s interesting to look at, as are the real sycamores and maple trees around us. Office workers talk about the silver trees, as they circle the park and sit on benches, smoking, eating, drinking, looking furtively or not at one another. As they get the fresh air and exercise necessary for people whose days are spent sitting at desks in surrounding buildings.

Behind me, suddenly, an argument. There is shouting. There is an indeterminate accent. I also cannot determine exactly what the argument is about. It has something to do with one man not controlling his dog or dogs, to the consternation of another man. I try to ignore it and read. But a young woman in sleeveless business attire and sporting a tattoo on her right bicep is walking directly toward me. She’s pulling a friend along, and two other women in her group follow.

“Oh,” she says. “I’ve got to see this.”

Instantly, there is a crowd directly in front of me, a group of rubbernecks staring over the hedgerow and into the dog pen, where there is potential human violence. With timeless morbid curiosity, they are hoping to witness its manifestation. I’m hemmed in now by the onlookers. And so I rise and walk away. I turn and look behind me. I can see at last what’s going on inside the pen. Two large middle-aged men, face to face and vexed and swearing at one another, dressed identically in t-shirts, shorts, and cheap white sneakers with high tube socks. Yet another uniform of sorts.

Like most of us in the park, the two men and their pets have come here from quite a distance, I surmise, from another dissimilar part of the city, though I might be wrong. Nevertheless, on the surface, they do not fit in among tame office workers and struggling actors and the other dog owners.

Nor does their behavior.

I realize: this public space is irrefutably civilized, but what occurs in it not necessarily.

The potential combatants are being kept apart by a very small woman with a gray crew cut, wearing a shirt with cut-off sleeves. She’s the only peacemaker. Only she, apparently, is willing to get involved. No one else. She’s overmatched and the men could easily get at one another, but it’s obvious they don’t really want to. This argument is for show. The men don’t mind making a scene; in fact, they seem to enjoy the attention. This is theatre. They are acting and acting out. It’s not unlike the barking and chasing and mounting and nipping going on elsewhere in the pen.

I look for a cop who might pretend to restore order and put an end to this performance. I’ve rarely, if ever, seen one in Madison Square Park. And these days, why would I? I can’t help but wonder where this argument would have led had it occurred elsewhere in the city.

I’m near an exit. I hear people joking about the argument, which has now moved outside the dog run, apparently, to die. There will be no street fight today. Not here at least, in Madison Square Park. Yet a few young men on a bench enjoyed the spectacle.

“They’re behaving like animals,” one man says, for all to hear, laughing.

³Better than a dogfight,” his friend adds.

I look at the clock once again. Some lunchtime still left, but it’s time to go.

I meet Jim and my younger brother Chris, a Yankee fan, at Penn Station and we head to the Bronx on the D train, cautiously optimistic that the game will be played. It’s a cold, nasty, October-like day in April without the benefit of Bronx playoff buzz. It’s a new season, but something feels wrong about the day. Like all that is happening isn’t supposed to be happening. The Yanks are playing Baltimore. Chacon is pitching. And we don’t have tickets.

On the way uptown, among the grown men dressed in Jeter and Bernie Williams jerseys, Jim tells us about the work ahead. He’s doing all the plumbing and woodwork himself. He’s a plumber, a furniture refinisher, and a potter. I like to think of him of an artisan, in the classic sense. His meticulous nature makes him an anachronism, as does his eschewing of all technological innovations since 1995. Hates cell phones and computers, no email; he lives happily in an earlier time.

He tells us his wife and daughter are moving to his mother-in-law’s house for the summer, or for as long as it takes him to finish the job. He plans to sleep on a cot in the kitchen. It’s a huge job. The entire house, a former summer bungalow, will be torn up and a second floor added. He plans to be exhausted. He plans to live a Spartan life. He’s going into exile and, for the moment, this is his last hurrah.

We scalp tickets because it’s a buyer’s market and because we want to get good seats under an overhang in case it rains, which by the looks of it might happen at any minute. Jim does the talking with the scalper, a man in his 50s, turning him down at first. The scalper leaves and then returns to sell us three of his four ducats. Apparently we’re supposed to follow him to the seats and pay him there. I’m not sure why. On the way, he tells us he’s from Westchester. Jim and Chris live on Long Island. I live in Brooklyn. Jim tells him this. I never find out why our scalper’s at the game alone. I don’t ask.

Once at our seats, we start drinking like sailors on shore leave. After awhile our scalper from Westchester says he sees friends in another section, and bids us adieu. I get the feeling he’s not telling the truth. We wish him luck and he’s on his way.

Miraculously the rain holds off, the game starts on time, and the entirety is played without delay. Again, however, I have an uneasy feeling—guilt—we’re getting away with something, we’re stealing.

In the sixth inning, I win five bucks from Jim when I bet him that Hideki Matsui will come through in the clutch and drive in at least two runs. Matsui hits a double off the left-centerfield wall with the bases loaded. We have no way of knowing that in two weeks he’ll break his wrist, sliding for a ball against the Red Sox, all but ending his season.

In the seventh we start talking about where we’re going next. A few bars in Manhattan and then back to Brooklyn, where Jim and Chris will be able to catch a train home at the LIRR-Flatbush Avenue Station.

By the time we get to Brooklyn the portentous weather has at last arrived, a torrent of rain and ankle-high puddles on 5th and Flatbush. I pull out an umbrella, and I’m lightly ridiculed. It’s my wife’s influence, I’m told. But I just don’t want to get wet.

In a bar on 5th, we continue our drinking. We’re in our mid-thirties now, too old to drink all day and into the night. We’re not supposed to be doing this. I feel foolish. And here is where I recognize the feeling I’ve had all day: I’ve been unconsciously reliving earlier days and nights I’ve spent with my dear friend and brother; days long gone now. I’m stealing time just like Julio Franco, the 47-year-old New York Met—bench player, pinch hitter, oldest player in Major League Baseball.

Chris decides it’s time to go. He’s got an infant daughter at home now. It’s so late in the evening that I don’t see the point, but he leaves anyway. Jim stays on. We drunkenly plug a small fortune into the jukebox, an ad hoc soundtrack from days when we were better-suited and age-appropriate for these antics. The crowd in the bar is, thankfully, not too young. Even they seem a little old to be carrying on the way they are. Jim and I are not the only ones in our thirties.

How tragically hip (not the band) and soaking in self-important irony Brooklyn can seem at times. A pose one outgrows, I once thought, but now I look around and I see poseurs my age still living the dream and it causes me to wonder what’s amiss.

When I told my father people were moving back to Bed-Stuy, where he grew up poor, and that they were young, educated, white people too, he looked at me like I was from Mercury. Move back there?

Sometimes I think Brooklyn is utterly and completely gentrified, and then something happens to make me think Brooklyn today is closer to his Brooklyn than it is to mine, and how that might not necessarily be a bad thing. And it’s not just Brooklyn–this is true of all of New York City.

People from Michigan and Long Island and New Jersey and Canada and Nebraska are moving to the LES. It looks harmless, like a playground, to them. But the next thing you know, last night’s bouncer is dumping a corpse on the side of the Belt Parkway.

Our hipster scene can be amusing however, and I try not to judge—not outwardly anyway—for fear of appearing a curmudgeon. I need to be increasingly careful of that these days, even though I felt the same way at 23.