The Village People

When I emerged from the subway at West 4th Street and 6th Avenue, I came upon a large crowd gathered outside what is widely known -- at least in New York -- as "The Cage."

The Cage is a place where amateur basketball players from all over the city come to play skilled -- albeit slightly violent -- hoops. It is about as no-frills as you can get: a chain link fence, a non-regulation size court (real estate is hard to come by in New York), a background chorus of honking horns and drivers yelling obscenities, a haze of exhaust fumes, and the occasional drunk sprawled against the base of the fence, stealing a prime front row seat.

To say the least, the basketball being played in The Cage is a bit different from what I'm accustomed to seeing on the well maintained park district courts in deep dark suburbia. Let's just say I didn't notice any height challenged middle aged Jewish guys wearing knee braces and panting uncontrollably after three minutes of play. I'll leave it at that.

After watching the guys play for a while, I headed off to Washington Square Park to meet my son and daughter and a few of their friends. Again, I was struck by how this "park" in the midst of Greenwich Village is, well, a bit different from what I've grown accustomed to. Sure, there were some short Jewish guys who I am sure had knee braces concealed under their khakis, but there was, in addition, a veritable mosaic of folks from all walks of life. The downtrodden and the upscale, young and old, gay and straight, a rainbow of skin tones. Everybody looked somewhat out of place, and everybody looked as if they somehow belonged.

Ahh. The big city. Where basketball is played within the confines of a "cage," a cage that serves as much to keep the spectators outside safe from the violence and chaos within as it does to protect the seriously skilled amateurs from the violence and chaos beyond the chain link fence. Where people from across the economic and social and racial spectrum come together in a rare patch of urban greenery like stray pieces of an unfinished jigsaw puzzle and somehow fit together, despite the jagged edges.

I am at the airport now, awaiting my flight back to Chicago. The diversity in the gate area isn't quite as striking as it seemed in the Village, but I make no assumptions. I am willing to bet each person here has a unique story to tell.