Home Sweet Home

My apartment in Once (pronounced ‘on-say’) is on the eighth floor of our building, overlooking a busy street corner. The intersection is a swarming mass of warm bodies, hot engines and beating sunshine. The light glows soft and bright off the sides of the tall edifices, painting them in grayish-white and gentle highlights of peach and rose. The cacophony of noise rises up through the large, glass doors that swing open into our living room and expose the city. Looking over the railing, I’m reminded of the inner-workings of an anthill, or at least what I imagined them to be as a child. A stairwell entrance to the subway burrows down beneath the street on every corner of the crossing. The roads are a constant construction zone, littered with orange pylons, rickety chicken-wire fencing and concrete barriers. Dust takes on a life of its own, dancing in eddies amidst torrents of bus traffic and the wind of towering buildings. Inevitably it finds its way into our apartment and settles as a film across the floor. Regardless of how recently the maid has cleaned, the result is a perpetual blackness on the bottoms of our feet, as though we were walking over the asphalt itself. To the immediate right of the downstairs entrance is a kiosk with a soft serve ice cream vendor in front. The woman selling ice cream lets out a high-pitched call, a constant, rhythmic siren reminding the passers-by of her presence. “Hay Heladoooooos!” Close your eyes and picture Alvin the Chipmunk with a head cold. The sound can be heard from blocks away, from inside the building as I wait for the elevator, and even through the hustle and bustle that enters my eighth floor windows. Sometimes, walking home from the grocery store, I get lost in the flow of the streets and venture a block past my front door. But then a voice calls out, like a beacon, steering me to safety. “Hayy Heladoooooos!” It’s simply a part of the neighborhood. Like the construction. I always laugh when I walk past signs that say, “Men at Work.” It’s the irony of vacant job sites, or the more amusing collection of bodies sitting, loitering, kicking up their heels. “Men at Lunch” would be a more accurate symbol. When there is work in progress, it’s elementary at best. The site at the corner is an attempt to put in new electrical lines for the subway. Currently, they’re excavating the site with a bucket tied to the end of a rope. I think they’re on schedule to finish with the Big Dig. I’ll have more on the neighborhood in future postings.