about last night, as I walked to the Metro, and I heard a reedy and mostly off-key rendition of The Beatles’ Eight Days a Week being played on the recorder.
I can’t tell you much about the musician. I chose to listen rather than look. But I know that he was shabbily dressed and tall, with long dark brown fingers that covered holes on the hard plastic recorder without much sense of rhythm. I wasn’t sure it was Eight Days a Week at first, because the tune was being stretched to its limit. But as I walked down the long, sloping escalator into the man-made dark of the Metro, the notes followed, one after the other in careful — but wrong — tempo.
The funny thing was, you could hear it better at the bottom of the escalator than in the middle. So it was loud for a moment as I passed him, then drowned by shuffling footsteps and grinding of machinery, and then sweetly clear until it faded out of range.
Don’t ask me to pull a point or a moral out of this. I can’t, and I don’t want to. All I know is that, for a few seconds, there was a triangle between me at the bottom of the Metro escalator, the long-fingered and lonely musician at the top, and a teenage boy from Liverpool who couldn’t have imagined the world I live in.