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Chabon essays have this effect on me.
There’s a woman in New York City who makes her living singing under a bridge five days a week. The first time I heard her play I walked on by, and the second time was when I went back to pay her for the music, still in my head hours later. I’d held it there in case I wouldn’t see her again. I didn’t know if she’d still be there when I got back, but I learned that bridge is her bridge – she’s very nearly always there. Five days a week she sings and plays the guitar, and in that time, in what people decide to give, she makes her living. Saturday and Sunday pay for her rent, Monday and Tuesday she spends at home learning new songs, and Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday go to whatever they can buy her.
When I asked, she told me a story so amazing I knew it had to be true: that she used to be a nanny until the family moved to Seattle, with the child she’d helped raise from a baby going along with them. She didn’t volunteer any details except to hold her hands out like she had a baby in them when she spoke about it, and I didn’t interrupt to let her go on to say she’d decided to do what made her happy, which is why she’s working under a bridge singing songs to whoever comes by. Only in New York.
She picked a good spot for busking, and I’m sure she thought about it before settling on her bridge. She sings on a well-walked footpath that plenty of tourists and residents use, and it gives her some shelter to play, and the brick walls – built to last – let her voice echo out, calling to people to come listen a while, next to her or just leaning down from the top of her bridge. They come and go, passing by and coming back, sometimes to drop money in and sometimes to ask questions and talk a little bit.
As far as I know, with “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and “Danny Boy” hours apart, she doesn’t write songs and performs them instead. Because of what she does, it’s by necessity a sparse arrangement and good music – if it was bad, she wouldn’t be making a living out there. She sings cleanly and clearly, with precise inflection and a gentle voice, the sort of music that moves without being cloying. By necessity, she has to sing like that, without sounding like a wind-up toy but like she really means it. And she might, so it sounds that she does. And she might not, and just wish to get through another couple of hours and that some generous tourists come by so she can call it a day, and she has to sound as though she means it just the same.
The way she talked about it when I asked her, I think – more often than not – she really does.
When I asked, she told me a story so amazing I knew it had to be true: that she used to be a nanny until the family moved to Seattle, with the child she’d helped raise from a baby going along with them. She didn’t volunteer any details except to hold her hands out like she had a baby in them when she spoke about it, and I didn’t interrupt to let her go on to say she’d decided to do what made her happy, which is why she’s working under a bridge singing songs to whoever comes by. Only in New York.
She picked a good spot for busking, and I’m sure she thought about it before settling on her bridge. She sings on a well-walked footpath that plenty of tourists and residents use, and it gives her some shelter to play, and the brick walls – built to last – let her voice echo out, calling to people to come listen a while, next to her or just leaning down from the top of her bridge. They come and go, passing by and coming back, sometimes to drop money in and sometimes to ask questions and talk a little bit.
As far as I know, with “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and “Danny Boy” hours apart, she doesn’t write songs and performs them instead. Because of what she does, it’s by necessity a sparse arrangement and good music – if it was bad, she wouldn’t be making a living out there. She sings cleanly and clearly, with precise inflection and a gentle voice, the sort of music that moves without being cloying. By necessity, she has to sing like that, without sounding like a wind-up toy but like she really means it. And she might, so it sounds that she does. And she might not, and just wish to get through another couple of hours and that some generous tourists come by so she can call it a day, and she has to sound as though she means it just the same.
The way she talked about it when I asked her, I think – more often than not – she really does.