Friday, December 10, 2004
Instrumentality
It didn’t look like an instrument, and they didn’t look like musicians.
I was stumbling back from the coffee room with a fresh mugga when I saw them pushing the big red box off the service elevator. One of them looked like “the building super” - in his middle years, dressed in sturdy sensible clothes, his eyes preoccupied and his pockets bulging with tools, hardware and communications devices. He was the guy I could trust with a housekey if I had to go out while he was at work. The other guy with him was a little hinkier - the “labor,” with tight faded jeans, a scruffy little beard, a worn plaid shirt and long hair that clearly got more of his attention than most anything else in his life. Between them was a red metal box on chunky metal wheels, about four feet tall and four feet long, rolling heavily, pocked with wear and corrosion. It was an explicitally ambiguous piece of equipment so I asked what it was. “Labor” grinned broadly but vacantly as “super” offered a terse but informative explanation: “It’s to test the fire department standpipes.” Okay, cool. So we test standpipes. We’re that much less likely to be consumed in an inferno. I was grateful.
A few hours later my gratitude took a new dimension: I was sitting in my beige cube staring at the screen upon which I concentrate for so much of my day when I sensed a presence both alien and familiar - heard it beneath the buzz and click of office hardware, felt it though the soles of my no-nonsense shoes: a groaning hum, surrounding me, in the floor, and across the ceilings and through the walls. It sounded like the building was waking up after a long deep slumber. Pipes that ran up the spine of the mid-rise building, sturdy though dusty, vibrated into expression. It rumbled through my skin and into my bones, a sonic presence that seemed to lift my awareness up out of my head and into my world. I knew that sound - I’ve made it myself often enough. It’s the first croaking noise to emanate from a throat too long unused. The building was finding its voice. The building was singing. Those two operations & maintenance contractors and their big red box had taken the distinctly undistinguished office block in which I labored daily, blind ot my own environment more often than not, and turned it ito something that breathed, sang, lived.
Since then my goal has been to hear the other songs I usually can’t hear, and more to the point, to recognize the singers and the musicians that hide among us in grimy boots and rusty boxes. There is music more places than I can hear it, and it’s up to me to open my ears a little wider. The musicians are doing their part already.
