Thursday, September 11, 2008
The Piper (Unpied)
Coming home that Friday night, I had a predisposition towards things musical. I’d started the day receiving an unexpected trove of something that was indubitably music, followed by a long listening session while I worked, not to mention the day-long anticipation of the arrival of houseguests that night from whom I’d come to learn of many new musical horizons. All in all, I was primed for what happened, but even so it caught me entirely by surprise.
I stood by my bus stop - a slender refuge amid four lanes of one way traffic threading thickly past the massive feet of the office blocks that towered overhead. The falling light of early evening poured down Bush Street, glowing off the stately edifices. It stands to reason that I was wearing my iPod, that I was letting it fill the interstices of my mind with revivifying music, but then how did I come to speak to that man and his wife? Perhaps it was during a break between songs on my playlist, a much-precedented sticking of my nose into other people’s business, but somehow we did find ourselves in conversation at the bus stop. She in jeans and a T, he in a longsleeved button-up traveler’s shirt and a slightly ponderous pair of cargo shorts. Both, as I recall, wore hats and carried canvas knapsacks. They were from San Diego, they told me. We discussed transit developments in major California cities in a breezy, offhand way; when the man opined that the 38 wouldn’t get them out to the Cliff House and old ruined baths, I gently disabused him. Decent enough folks for tourists, I warranted. They were free to share my bus with me so far as I was concerned.
As we all headed out they were sitting together up front with slightly clenched primness, hands draped over knees and eyes alert and vigilant - at least, at first. But they wound up surrendering their seats to some elderly locals and eventually they separated, the woman in jeans sitting somewhere else and the cargo shorts guy sitting on the inward-facing bench across from mine. We shared a brief recognizant nod, and I went back to my notebook and headphones. I was writing something very important and listening to something I probably really liked. He was fumbling with his tourist paraphernalia. I had better things with which to concern myself.
A quick glance: he was untwisting an earphone cord. Back to my notebook and my playlist. Then, another glance: he has plugged the cord into a small grey box - clunky for an MP3 player, could it be GPS? How excruciatingly tourist. I didn’t expect such gaucherie but there you go. Back to my notebook again.
And then a few moments later, a third glance up: he’s assembled a short tube from segments of black brushed steel; up and down its ten-inch or so length are darker spots - holes? pads? He’s now screwing it into the base of that dull grey box, about the size of a cellphone. With a flick of his eyes he catches me watching him, and responds with a disarmingly lopsided smile before returning to his work.
My notebook lies forgotten on my lap. I’m watching the tourist building something. The little grey box reads, “Radio Shack / Micro-Pipes.” That isn’t helpful. Or, actually, now it is. He’s put the earphone in his ear, and he’s holding the tube out in front of him with the fingertips of both hands as if it were a musical instrument, some sort that only he could hear. Maybe a recorder, or an oboe, or some exotic asp-charming woodwind of which I’ve never heard.
Whatever was programmed into that device, that’s what he was playing, his eyes fluttering closed with concentration, or perhaps with distraction, as a song I could not hear bore him away from where he sat, in his hat and cargo shorts, before me on a bench in my bus in body only. His lady friend may have been going to the Cliff House but he was on his own trip, and I felt like the tourist as I watched his fingers own the landscape of the tiny silent instrument over which, steepled, they danced.
