Little Frog's Tail

Sana sana colita de rana, si no sanas hoy, sanarás mañana.

—Spanish Nursery Rhyme

The first shock of disaster and jubilation looks eerily similar on a human face. Adrenaline moves the same way. Eyes go wide the same way. The nervous system responds the same way. We are animals. The goal is oxygen in case we must run or fight. The fastest way to get it? Open-mouthed astonishment.

Otherwise known as a jaw drop.

I.

After Game Three, the only one we lost, nuns came to 33rd Street. They circled Eighth Avenue with holy water and prayed. Believers in energy and its potential for corruption came with sage. They lit the ends on fire, blew it out, and then swished it through the warm June air. Later, I read about someone who carried Vicks VapoRub in their pocket and repeated the Spanish nursery rhyme they were raised on.

Sana sana colita de rana, si no sanas hoy, sanarás mañana.

Heal, heal, little frog’s tail; if you don’t heal today, you’ll heal tomorrow.

Parents will say those words to soothe their sick children in one of the hundreds of cultures that call New York City home. New York City, which speaks at least 800 different languages. New York City, where 37% of us were born outside the United States. New York City, where many of America’s most progressive laws were catalyzed and tested. This City. My City.

The one set of coordinates I’ve never been ashamed to call home.

II.

I saw Patrick Ewing for the first time on a hotel TV somewhere in South Florida during a rainstorm. I know it was the end of March because the last week of Spring Break was a keystone of my parents’ custody arrangement. I somehow doubt my Dad knew he was dooming himself to spend the most thrilling week of college basketball alone with his young daughter when they made that agreement.

My father was obsessed with sports. All sports. Which meant that depending on the season, every football, basketball, baseball, boxing, tennis, hockey, and/or golf game airing on any television or radio station in the nation was what I was up against for his attention. Not a team here or there. EVERY team. Not a game here or there. EVERY game. If any of these events were occurring at the same time, then my father would watch and listen to them all at once. We’re talking about a period in history when — generally speaking, of course — a tour bus might be a more apt metaphor for paternal parenting than a helicopter. These were prehistoric times when the human animal was forced to change channels with its entire body. The simultaneity my Dad desired was therefore achieved decades before technology would provide it by his physically switching between stations on both the television and three separate radios, plotted in a mysterious configuration wherever he was seated.

I remember it rained for most of that trip. I remember he answered my questions and explained various things. Where Georgetown was. To keep my eyes on # 33. I remember the guy in the jersey shooting the ball from impossibly far away, that it somehow went clean through the net without ever touching the rim, and that the level of joy on my father’s face visibly increased as it did. I remember he pointed at the TV immediately after and uttered a single word:

SWISH!

III.

The USNS Comfort arrived in New York Harbor and anchored at a pier off the Hudson, where it waited. It was the end of March in a different century, in a new millennium. More than 30,000 diagnoses had been confirmed the day before the 897-foot ship arrived. A week later, the city I’d been born and raised in, and where I still chose to live, became the International apex of death and contagion.

The Navy’s idea in the 1980s was that when the ice melted and actual fighting with the Soviets began, the wounded would need somewhere to go. But the Cold War never turned hot. So the vessel with red-painted crosses around its hull, along with a sister ship, which they named Mercy, operated on the peripheries of humanitarian relief. It did bring relief. It also announced something essential to the rest of the world.

This is who we are.

We bring comfort.

We believe in mercy.

American soft power at work.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Cory J. Mendenhall/Coast Guard

Covid wasn’t the Comfort’s first docking in New York Harbor.

After September 11th, the ship was dispatched as a trauma hospital for patients who didn’t exist. So it adapted. Hot meals, and showers, clean clothes, and sleeping quarters were all provided for the many hundreds of relief workers who passed through its gangway each day.

These are the days we never talk about. The days when smoke still hung above the rubble. The days when the wreckage was searched through in shifts. The days when officials lied about the air. The days when photos of the missing appeared on lampposts. The days when whistles blew for a body. The days when loud machines knew to go quiet. The days of silencing our own dread.

IV.

There was a sign at the Knicks parade that I saw more than once.

THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING

Clearly meant to highlight how often fans had hoped over the past 53 years, and how often they’d been summarily defeated. Meant to say that now, finally, at last, what had been prayed for and fantasized about was here. I know that’s what the signs meant, but, man, would I appreciate being flashed one now and then during an ordinary day alive in this country on this planet during this time.

Wouldn’t you?

To have your perceived reality validated? To be assured that what you’re seeing, hearing, and feeling is…true? It’s all too much, too fast, too soon. I know I keep writing about this, but I don’t know how not to. Our bodies need time. Our nervous system needs rest. There is no way to pause long enough over each heartbreaking assault on our civics and humanity before the next one.

I write a lot about what it means for a citizenry to endure rolling disasters. What the drumbeat of trauma does to a collective psyche. How it raises cortisol levels, shortens telomeres, and changes DNA. I know it’s asking a lot to keep circling you back to a very upsetting place. But what happened in my city during just the last 25 years?

It bears emphasis. It bears repeating:

1. The worst terror attack on American soil.

2. The worst storm in a hundred years.

3. The worst public health crisis in a century.

And so, if you were here for Game 4 or if you were here three nights later when the clock zeroed out in San Antonio, you know. It was…something else. A different frequency. Another order of magnitude. Like a release valve was pulled. A stitch yanked in the seam.

What we’d been holding for so long. Everything unspoken.

Dashed hopes. Buried loss. Stifled grief.

All of this DID really happen.

Those nights in the middle of June in my City, the parade the day after too, I think they were meant to remind us—

That joy is relentless, too.

V.

So, listen. I’m not writing about that cheesy birthday party Saturday night. Sorry. There are enough hot takes to fill a fucking sweat lodge up in this internet. You don’t need to read about the same thing every Tom, Dick, and Substack Mary is thumping their thumbs at all within the same 24 hours. You need someone who has a hard time finishing things due to being wracked with paralyzing self-doubt who has time to reflect! You need the after-take! You need the leisurely trawling of your toes through the cooled-off water post-hot-take-take. You need to be reminded of things you were otherwise forced to forget because your memory and possibly your entire reality are being hijacked by the whims of indistinguishable, insatiable billionaires whose profit margins require you to keep scrolling past your very own lived experience before you’ve finished experiencing it!

That said, if you’re an American, I hope you enjoyed whatever food you ate or drink you drank and the people you were with and whichever remarkable display of incredibly loud shit you watched being blown up in the sky.

I just…

I mean.

It’s like having to make an appearance at someone you’ve known your whole life’s birthday party because they’re very sick and they might die soon, but the truth is they always made your friends uncomfortable, and lately they’ve been treating everyone around them like garbage!

Don’t get me wrong. I went. I took a few pictures of the elaborate ‘show.’

It’s not like I’m not a complete asshole, you know.

But the truth is I wasn’t paying very much attention. Too busy living off fumes. Fumes of a spontaneous street party for the ages that happened to celebrate every American value I was raised to hold dear. Possibility. Community. Diversity. Mercy. And yes, motherfuckers, Freedom. Religious freedom. Romantic freedom. Reproductive freedom.

All living and breathing in my hometown.

If you’ve never heard the pure ecstasy of an entire city’s voice rising to the highest rooftops in cacophonous waves of elation, or stepped outside at close to midnight and gotten spontaneously high-fived by a series of blissed-out strangers on the steamy streets of the greatest city in the world…the place where you were born and raised by a sports-nut of a Dad who took you to your first Knicks game forty or so years ago, a game where you vividly remember when a ball cast from the gargantuan arms of the same Georgetown juggernaut you’d watched together on that rainy day in South Florida, flew over Larry Bird’s head and went clean through the net, after which you uttered a word that seemed to bring more pride and delight to your father’s face than anything you’d to that point ever said—

S W I S H

Well, let me tell you:

It’s pretty fucking great.

VI.

The thing about those nights of solidarity and days of celebration was that you didn’t have to be a born New Yorker to feel it. You didn’t have to know it had been 53 years. You didn’t have to have seen Jalen Brunson’s father on the team that lost in the finals to the Spurs 27 years before. You didn’t have to know the guy who tipped the ball in to put a period on the greatest comeback in NBA history was the son of a Nigerian track star who passed away before he turned one. You didn’t need to sit with the fact that Karl-Anthony Towns buried a total of eight relatives during the pandemic or be aware that his Dominican-born mother, Jackie, died as the apex hit, or that he had to make the call to take her off a ventilator when he was only 24. You didn’t have to realize this was one version of the same shattering story, the same terrible choice so many daughters and sons had to make for the people they loved most during that same terrible year.

But you probably do know something about being doubted or rejected, unjustly scrutinized, or dismissed. You may have some experience with grief and longing or futility and faith. Haven’t you felt the weight of carrying around a barrel of sorrow without ever showing its face?

A beating heart and an intact soul were all you needed to come to the party in New York City. To see how tired we were, how long we’d waited, and all we’d been holding in.

You didn’t have to believe in anything except the human spirit.

And if you understood the American dream, you’d know it when you see it.

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