Performer

When he saw you, Daughter, it seemed he wanted to please you, to bring some entertainment or excitement to a dreary day. He said he didn’t remember many kid songs, then magically produced a harmonica in his palm and proceeded to play a nearly perfect rendition of “Oh Suzanna”. When he blew the hot breaths through, we could smell hard liquor, but you were delighted by this interruption of the usual, hushed bus ride. I imagined that this was like “old times” same kind of poor people gathered in a boxcar, or bus, listening to the drawl of the harmonica, accompanied by a banjo or guitar maybe even singing by Burl Ives himself in his railroad hobo years. My romantic reverie was interrupted by the bus driver’s voice over the harsh intercom, “Would the gentleman with the harmonica stop playing on the bus?” His performance stopped I wasn’t sure whether he’d heard her or just completed the song. He looked up through watery, colorless eyes, lifted his callused hand to give the driver a courteous wave, smiling his toothless grin lifting his hat respectfully to reveal sparse scraggily white hairs. He turned back to you and winked saying, “Maybe next time, Kiddo.” On we rode, gently swaying with the rhythm of the bus in our silent, disappointed isolation. I had the impression that his once common form of expression was outdated, now uncommon, as obsolete as boxcars for the homeless (?) I lifted you to help you pull the string for our stop we clambered out, waiving, crunching into the tall, crusty snow bank. As we picked through the snow to our apartment you said “Maybe we can oneday sing a song to someone through a harmonica.”