Symphony

November 21, 1980

A chill wind blows outside my cold water flat this Friday in late November, racing through the alley and into the court yard, creating a haunting howl three weeks too late for Halloween. It stirs up junk from the shed carrying it along the walls, pealing away even more paint than neglect has, the rattle sounding like a kid with a stick striking the individual spears of a fence; the wind misses none of them.

The trash truck makes it rounds with its own symphony of crashes and bangs, the massive compacter crunching the contents of each trash can deposited in its massive mouth – sometimes devouring the rusted trash cans, too.

This is the kind of day when even the heartiest of the neighborhood don’t wander too far out, taking shelter against an invasion no one can resist, brutal in its occupation, threatening to remain for months and promising to inflict even more damage on this dismal landscape in which we live.

For me, lying here, under three blankets (and still feeling cold), sounds fill the world, a train whistling from the freight line three blocks away, dim, but clear, as regular as the tick of a clock, a visitor we endure everyday in the early morning hours before most of us rise from sleep.

It is too early in the season for the river to freeze, the way it does by mid-winter when its surface turns into overlapping slabs of ice.

When people wake and wander out they grumble and vow to get home early or soon or as fast as possible, going off to work or store or school or some other destination I cannot make out from their shouts back and forth.

Yet after a while, after the frustrated starts of cars, grinding of gears, doors opening and slammed shut, and finally tires spinning away, silence returns, not the early morning silence, but a murmur of a city staggering into day.

This ritual varies with the temperature, louder in warmer weather when windows are ajar, muffled now huddled against the cold, made remote as the cars here fade into some distance I only imagine, and repeated in reverse later with their eventual return.

This an aging neighbor, full of old Poles, and new Puerto Ricans, and a scattering of blacks that drift down from Market Street – that imaginary border between the Dundee side of this city and downtown.

We keep expecting it to change, the way other places change, new, richer, arrogant people displacing the poor the way they have in places like Hoboken and Manhattan; new sounds to interrupt the morning ritual I can hear awake or sleep. None come. Not even with the trains.

The old slowly die off, replaced by younger versions of their selves, new immigrants speaking in tongues from Communist ravished Poland, and young Latinos bringing in new strains of Spanish when I still do not understand the old.

I just listen to the sounds, putting each into its place each time a new one comes, part of this symphony I wake to each morning and drift off with each night, wondering the whole time, where my sounds fit in.