September 15
Every morning around seven o’clock, I hear a cleaning lady hawking spit into a sink. There’s a little utility room next door, where the women clean mops and fill buckets of water. Every morning she makes this noise, getting rid of the phlegm and the previous day’s grit.
On a crowded street full of the hard sounds of Chinese and squealing brakes, the voice of a child rises above the din. I look to my left and see a little boy doing his math homework on the seat of his mother’s scooter. She sells socks in plastic packets by the stairs of the pedestrian overpass. The little boy has a chubby face and a buzz cut. He happily blurts out his equations as he writes the numbers in a little notebook spread out on the vinyl seat.
On the other side of the overpass, I come upon two midgets performing karaoke by the entrance to the Line 10 subway. They sing through amplifiers that come to their waist, a squat man in his late thirties and a midget girl in her twenties. They have good pitch. They sing sentimental pop tunes. The concrete environs make for good acoustics. If you were a busker of average height who wanted to perform in the street, I don’t think you’d want to compete with them. The sounds of the bass line and vocals fade as I turn the corner, as I say to myself in a loud inner voice, “Do people still say midget?”
Every morning around seven o’clock, I hear a cleaning lady hawking spit into a sink. There’s a little utility room next door, where the women clean mops and fill buckets of water. Every morning she makes this noise, getting rid of the phlegm and the previous day’s grit.
On a crowded street full of the hard sounds of Chinese and squealing brakes, the voice of a child rises above the din. I look to my left and see a little boy doing his math homework on the seat of his mother’s scooter. She sells socks in plastic packets by the stairs of the pedestrian overpass. The little boy has a chubby face and a buzz cut. He happily blurts out his equations as he writes the numbers in a little notebook spread out on the vinyl seat.
On the other side of the overpass, I come upon two midgets performing karaoke by the entrance to the Line 10 subway. They sing through amplifiers that come to their waist, a squat man in his late thirties and a midget girl in her twenties. They have good pitch. They sing sentimental pop tunes. The concrete environs make for good acoustics. If you were a busker of average height who wanted to perform in the street, I don’t think you’d want to compete with them. The sounds of the bass line and vocals fade as I turn the corner, as I say to myself in a loud inner voice, “Do people still say midget?”
RSS Feed