You hear the ropes before you see them. Two ropes turning in opposite directions and a girl jumping between them and her feet never touch the ground at the wrong time. Double dutch. The most complicated thing happening on any sidewalk in New York and nobody is watching because everybody has seen it before. Two girls turning. One girl jumping. The rhythm is not learned. The rhythm is inherited. You do not teach double dutch. You absorb it. You stand on the side and you watch and one day you walk in and your feet know what to do.

The ropes hit the concrete and the sound is a drumbeat. A double drumbeat. Two ropes two beats and the girl in the middle is dancing to a song that has no music. She is the music. Her sneakers on the sidewalk and the ropes on the concrete and the girls turning are singing a rhyme and the rhyme is the time signature and the time signature is perfect. Every block in Harlem had a double dutch crew. Every block in the Bronx. Every block in Brooklyn. This was not a game. This was choreography performed on a stage made of concrete with an audience that did not know it was watching art.

You needed three things for double dutch. Two ropes and a piece of sidewalk. That is it. No equipment. No field. No referee. No coach. No uniform. No fee. No signup sheet. The sidewalk was the arena and anybody could play if they could keep up with the ropes. Double dutch was the most democratic sport in the city because the only qualification was rhythm and rhythm does not cost anything.

The competitions. You do not know about the competitions. The American Double Dutch League. Teams from every borough. Girls who could do backflips inside spinning ropes. Girls who could jump on one foot for three minutes without missing. Girls who could trade places inside the ropes without stopping. The judges scored speed and compulsory and freestyle and the freestyle was where you saw things that should not be possible. A human body moving between two ropes at two hundred turns per minute. That is not a game. That is physics refusing to cooperate with gravity.

You do not see double dutch on the sidewalk anymore. The sidewalks are full of people looking at their phones. The ropes are in a closet somewhere. The girls who turned the ropes are grandmothers now and their granddaughters do not know what double dutch is. But somewhere in a gymnasium in the Bronx a team is practicing and the ropes are hitting the floor and a girl is jumping and her feet never touch the ground at the wrong time. The rhythm did not die. The rhythm moved indoors. And that is the saddest thing about New York. The things that belonged on the sidewalk are all indoors now.