Years ago, when I used to take the train to school and back, one day I witnessed a very interesting situation that I hold as the best memory of my train days.
The line I used to go to school was relatively new, especially the stations closer to here - they were very clean and had music playing all the time. The trains almost matched the stations, but were harder to keep in good shape, I believe. None the less, most of them had music playing all the time.
I eventually learned the music played depended on the conductor. First I noticed the songs were always in the same order, later that each genre matched each voice (from the conductors announcing each station). By the end of a year, I knew rather well what songs played, and sometimes in what order.
One day, however, perhaps because the conductor was tired of playing the same CD over and over, on came a song I had never heard on the train before. Two late-teen guys standing nearby started to comment on it.
"What a weird song. Look at the instruments, it's crazy."
"Yeah, and the guy's voice, I don't think I've seen anyone sing like that. Nuts."
"Nuts is right. What's the conductor on today? What kinda music is that?"
The dialog went on like that for a few more lines, until it was interrupted by one of the most incredible (in the sense of being unable to believe) people I have ever seen. A black man, around sixty, slightly fat, wearing a hat.
"Show some respect. That's B.B. King, master of Blues."
Precisely that, "That's B.B. King, master of Blues.", in a rough voice of slightly fat black man in his sixties, straight out of a park in some famous city in the United States, where he sits during autumn afternoons and shares his taste and knowledge of the good music - Blues, Jazz, Soul, "your rock'n'roll came from this" - with anyone willing to listen to him and his outstanding collection of vinyl records, and maybe play a match of chess to pass the time. If he had not said it in Portuguese, I would have been sure it was a scene from some movie about the theme playing in a big screen on a train for gods know what reason. But it was an actual man, two stations from here; not a character in a movie, not someone in the Central Park or Jackson Square: just a guy in a train I was on, trivially standing there as I waited to get to school.
I have very few complaints about my time riding the train to school. This event made most of them quite worthwhile.
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Adendo ao comentário sobre o Rio de Janeiro: o Rio também tem Iraque, Afeganistão e coisas do tipo: ficam mais perto e são chamados popularmente de "morros".
Posted by Etienne at December 4, 2006 04:10 PM