Rebounder

Dear Diary:

On the first morning of the year’s second or third false spring, my 10-year-old son and I went to play basketball at our local playground court. It’s a true Robert Moses special, hemmed in on one side by the Cobble Hill trench, and on the other by Columbia Street’s on-ramp to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

The court is loud, even on an otherwise quiet Sunday. Before a nearby concrete-recycling plant closed last year, the dirt it spewed would sometimes cover the ground with a thin layer of dust that rose with each dribble.

On this day, we were alone, except for a father pushing a baby in a bear suit on a swing set. I reminded my son that he used to be a baby in a bear suit, but he didn’t seem to remember or care. He was too focused on the task at hand. The task, of course, was balling. My job was to rebound.

After about 10 minutes, a car pulled up to the traffic light just beyond the fence.

We are a nearsighted family, and so all I can tell you is that it was a light-colored car full of basketball fans. They cheered for us, calling out from across the park.

Did they call us by name? We couldn’t hear a word. Did we know them? We couldn’t see. All of our shots were falling through the net, as if the temporary audience had granted us superpowers.

The light changed, and the car drove on.

“Who was that?” my son asked.

“I have no idea,” I said.

“They were cheering for you, too,” he said, as if this provided an additional wrinkle to the mystery.

It was just what Robert Moses might have had in mind: myopic beauty on an island in the middle of a tangle of highways.

— Emma Straub

Ms. Straub is an author and owner of Books Are Magic. Her most recent book is “American Fantasy.”

12 Days

Dear Diary:

It started as a normal subway ride. There were a few of us: Gary, Harry and I forget who else. We were heading home from rehearsal. It was Christmastime, and there was nowhere to sit. The three of us stood at a pole, and Gary started to sing “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

It wasn’t uncharacteristic of Gary, and I might have tensed, which wouldn’t have been uncharacteristic of me. I noticed a twinkle in Harry’s eyes, and by the second day of Christmas, he had followed suit.

I probably smiled, a kind of smile that suggested I didn’t wish to participate, and they didn’t make me.

By the third day of Christmas, Gary had turned to someone we didn’t know, and the implication was clear: Whether we would have French hens relied wholly on this person.

There was a reluctance to acknowledge Gary at first, followed by a sense of “No,” followed by, somehow, a softening, and — wouldn’t you know it? — we had French hens.

Gary continued with gusto, moving from stranger to stranger. New Yorkers, not famous for bursting into song on command, seemed to expect it. It’s possible some even hoped to be picked. I don’t recall a single person refusing.

It’s a long song, and people got off before it was over. The doors slid open at one stop as we counted down the days. “Five Golden Rings!” someone bellowed from the turnstiles, and everyone cheered. They left the subway car, but they didn’t leave us.

I sat in wonder at how, despite the cold and the hard of living in the city, the hurries and the worries, right beneath the surface — barely beneath it, in fact — we’re here. Right here.

And Gary is an angel on Earth.

— Ken Leung

Mr. Leung is an actor. He appears on the HBO show “Industry.”

Room With a View

Dear Diary:

Ten years ago, after my divorce, I was looking for an apartment when I saw a listing for a one-bedroom at the Volney, where Dorothy Parker had lived and died.

Even before seeing the place, I told myself I would probably take it. If the building was good enough for Dorothy Parker, it was certainly good enough for me.

The apartment definitely had an air of older single woman, but being one myself — and because it possessed two peeks of Central Park — I eagerly took it.

I immediately set up my computer and prepared to write, marveling at how all a writer needed was “a room with a view.” I prepared to channel Dorothy Parker by Googling Dorothy Parker.

That was when I discovered the truth: Dorothy Parker didn’t exactly love the building. In fact, she may have hated it.

In her time — the 1950s and ’60s — the studio and one-bedroom apartments were mostly occupied by older single women with dogs. According to the Dorothy Parker Society, there were over three dozen dogs in the building.

It seems Dorothy Parker was pretty annoyed that she’d ended up in this land of older single women and their pooches, though she famously had dogs herself.

The Volney and its occupants would become fodder for her largely unsuccessful 1953 play, “The Ladies of the Corridor,” which a New York Times critic called “a sad depiction of widowed and divorced women before feminism.”

Happily, the building, and its occupants, have changed enormously. Apartments were combined; families with children moved in. Celebrities — including Baby Jane Holzer and Lena Horne — did too.

But the Volney remains home to a bevy of single women with dogs, just like me. When we meet for drinks or greet each other with our dogs, I’m grateful for feminism and girlfriends. And for dogs.

— Candace Bushnell

Ms. Bushnell is a writer and most recently an author of “Rules for Being a Girl.”

Halloween ’04

Dear Diary:

Halloween 2004. I didn’t live in New York yet. But I drummed in an arduous and insolvent band based in L.A. that took our name from a pulp porno paperback.

We had just played a whopper of a gig at a place near the then-pizza-heavy Montrose Avenue L stop. When you don’t live here, a New York slice is the greatest food ever invented.

The show was a joyous and raucous mess, and a great time was had. Afterward, our guitarist and I got a ride to an infamous Sunday night dance party on Spring Street.

Despite the recent smoking ban, indoor cigarettes were de rigueur. It turned out we knew one of the DJs and he offered his floor as a crash pad.

Upon arriving groggily by yellow cab, we realized no one had a key. Somehow, we managed to get in after a very long half-hour. It was around 5:30 a.m.

Surprisingly, there were plenty of carpeted rooms and a small backyard, and sunlight broke through the trees. There were about seven of us, and folks started to pair up and pass out, or both.

A master of the French exit, I decided now was the time to split. Upon exiting the apartment, I found myself at an impasse, with three identical doors in front of me and the door to my friend’s apartment having locked automatically behind me.

With zero idea which door would lead me outside, I made what seemed like the obvious choice: the middle one.

Wrong. I opened the door, and a woman bolted upright in her bed and let out an exasperated scream. People live in single rooms here?

I shut the door quickly. Luckily, one of the other doors led me directly outside. I ran. Fast.

Why is everything so embarrassing?

— Brooks Headley

Mr. Headley is a chef and the owner of Superiority Burger in Manhattan.

At the Strand

Dear Diary:

I was at the Strand, where I thought I might find a book a friend had recommended, the novel “Old God’s Time” by the Irish writer Sebastian Barry.

I looked for it along the alphabetically arranged fiction shelves on the store’s vast ground floor, but could not find a copy.

Just then, I saw three people approaching: a young man who was a sales assistant, and a middle-aged couple who turned out to be tourists from Ireland.

The Strand is one of the largest independent bookstores in the world, and the largest in New York City. Its four floors contain more than 18 miles of shelf space holding 2.5 million new and used books.

So how incredible was it to hear that the couple was also looking for a copy of “Old God’s Time.”

The men shared my amazement at this extraordinary coincidence. But the woman was not so impressed.

“Well, you know,” she said with a shrug, “in Ireland, this kind of thing happens all the time.”

— Sigrid Nunez

Ms. Nunez is a writer. Her book “It Will Come Back to You” comes out next month.

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Illustrations by Agnes Lee