Every year, for seventeen years, I went to the US Open. And always alone. It was a ritual with myself
One year I met this woman. I was about 20 and in my all-black goth phase. She- in her late 40’s or early 50s, frumpily dressed. It was Labor Day weekend and there was a rain delay. We were amongst the crazy few still waiting it out. A bunch of drunk Floridians were shouting behind us. We got talking and she asked for my email. Reluctantly I gave it, although I had no interest in seeing her again. We had nothing in common whatsoever.
The following year, just before the Opens, she got in touch with me. Would I like to meet up with her at Flushing Meadows? I did, again, reluctantly. Then again, the year after and the year after that till it became our ritual, together. We met every Friday through Monday of the Labor Day weekend because that’s when I would go. Barbara went almost every day.
Although we both lived in New York we never kept in touch the remainder of the year. Yet, I knew so much about her. During a match, at every change-over, she would call her aged parents. I learned, from listening to her conversations, that her mother had had a hip replacement surgery, that her father had dementia. That her mother’s nurse was never up to par. That she was moving her parents from their New Jersey home to her spare apartment, which she used as an office.
Barbara made me do crazy things I’d never dream of doing on my own. One year, she made me sneak into court side seats at a Federer match by re-using two-day old tickets she had a friend fed-ex to her from California. She also taught me how to save money on tickets by subscribing to a ‘series’ and then re-selling them on e-bay and craigs list. Somehow, and completely by accident, over about twelve years, Barbara and I became friends.
One year, around 2008 I think, Barbara told me she had cancer in her stomach. She was a petit woman but extremely feisty and she said this much in the manner someone might say they have a cavity. I was sure nothing terrible would happen to her. She still went to every single session that year and collected the baseball cap they give away on the first Friday evening session of every tournament. She had been collecting these caps, she told me, for thirty-five years. A tradition that started when she was a child and would come to the Opens with her father.
The following year, instead of meeting me during the Labor Day Weekend, she asked if I’d like to go to the finals with her. I didn’t want to. Roger Federer was playing against a new kid on the block– Juan Martin Del Potro, who hit the ball harder than I’ve ever seen anyone in my life. The finals promised to be quite magnificent.
I’d much rather have watched it from a premium seat in front of the TV but Barbara wasn’t well so I said I’d take her. She weighed about 70 lbs, and I had to help her up the steps of the LIRR platform. Still she went.
Later that year, wondering how her health was, I called her- the first time outside the time frame of the US Open. I called her several times and left several messages but I never heard back. Early 2010 I got a call from her number. But it wasn’t Barbara. It was her mother’s nurse. Barbara was in the hospital and dying.
I ran to Sloan Memorial Kettering where I met her mother for the first time. Besides her mother and her nurse, there was just me and another friend-some other crack pot woman Barbara had picked up at the Opens one year. I stayed with her in the hospital for days. She was the first person I ever saw die in front of me. For days afterwards, I would see her face everywhere in the crowd. I kept in touch with her mother afterwards and when I moved to England, I would call her more often than I called my own. Going to the Opens in subsequent years, without her, felt perfunctory. I did it at first, telling myself it’s what Barbara would want me to do but then I stopped. The crowds were getting worse with every year. It wasn’t enjoyable anymore to stand in mile long lines, alone, having no one to save your seat.
I let this one tradition go.