The Symphony

I have a front row seat for the symphony that is our neighborhood this summer. I have found that most of the movements of the piece allow one to synchronize one's life to the music.

Every Monday and Wednesday morning at approximately 7:00am, the garbage truck arrives in the alley below our bedroom window. The truck backs into the alley (beep, beep, beep in 2/2 time, mezzo forte). Once the truck engages the dumpster, which is immediately below our window, the tempo and dynamic increase culminating in the crash of the dumpster back onto the alley. The movement ends in a peaceful mezzo piano as the truck drives away.

Enter the landscapers each Monday. The whirring of weedwackers provides a melody over the thunder of multiple mower rotors. The occasional tenor solo in Spanish punctuates the bass of the equipment instruments. Theirs is a longer movement lasting from 7:30am to approximately 8:15am.

Each morning at approximately 8:10am a red car travels down our alley and triumphantly announces its arrival at the end of alley with four staccato fortissimo horn toots. This performance is an unaccompanied solo on days when the garbage truck and landscapers are not present.

After the initial movements of the piece, I am treated to a lengthy and repetitive roar of music from several different sources on the street. The concrete trucks prowl down the street to the large construction site a block away. The low rumble of their diesel engines is punctuated by the frequent and rapid fortissimo soprano voice of a car alarm that is much too sensitive to the engines' force. Time in this movement is kept by the piercing air horn blown at regular intervals at the construction site.

At approximately 2:30pm, the sounds of the school bus and the chatter of children enter in a gradual crescendo -- the growl of the school bus engine, the blast of the school bus horn to alert the guardian that the children's chorus is about to begin, and the apex of the crescendo with multiple soprano voices squealing with glee about their freedom.

Each movement is heavy with percussion. Various neighbors in the building and the postal carrier contribute to the rhythm of the piece with occasional cymbal-crashing door slams.

Some instruments make their contribution from the echo chamber that is the courtyard of our building. The bass voice of the handyman blends beautifully in a Serbo-Croation duet with the alto voice of our resident manager. A simple jingling of the handyman's keys announces their movement.

A male chorus of Serbo-Croation tenor voices sometimes provides the harmony and added percussion from the tools of tuckpointing. Lately, this movement has been replaced by a visiting troupe of Spanish tenors who provide uptempo voices and the scrape of tools removing decades of paint from the wooden back porches.

In the early afternoon, a father, son, and dog trio enter from across the alley. Father's cadenced bass voice like a Greek chorus ("Shoot the ball!") under the son's soprano whining ("Wait! Wait! Watch me!") is interjected by yelps from the dog. Their movement is dictated by the irregular bouncing of a basketball on the pavement and reaches a crescendo of competing voices when Mother arrives performing an aria on her cell phone.

This week has seen the addition of new instruments to the ensemble. A house across the street is being renovated. The musicians are slowly entering the piece with the buzzing of saws and the staccato tapping of hammers.

Voices and instruments of the orchestra gradually fade away as the day comes to an end. The cacophony of sound is reduced to a pianissimo tinkling of water falling from the resident manager's overflowing flower boxes on the third floor to the wooden porches below, finally sprinkling the pavement at approximately 4:30pm -- which consistently convinces me that I need to go to the bathroom. The symphony that is a weekday at the apartment, therefore, regularly closes with the diminishing sound of a flushing toilet.