The King Street

Scene in King Street Charleston last night

A man stops me and says, 'I'm X. I'm XX years old. I'm homeless. This all I got.' (He indicates the pack on his back). He says, 'I don't want to beg and I'm not begging. I hope you will listen to me without laughing as the people down the road did. Like I said, I'm not begging. But I'll polish your car, wash your windscreen, clean out the interior, but please - I'm not begging - for a few dollars.'

(Above is King Street.)
I said, 'I don't have a car, but I'll give you a couple of dollars.' He stands back and explains, 'Now, let me explain why I'm standing over here - so you won't think I'm going to snatch your wallet.' I give him the money. And then he says, 'Thank you. Now may I ask, did I offend you in any way by asking you for money?' I said no. And he said thank you again. I said 'good luck' and he was gone.

This evening as I was walking back up King Street, a fiddler busking in a doorway stopped playing and asked me about the book I was carrying under my arm. I said, 'It's The Dream of the Red Chamber. It's the greatest Chinese novel.' 'How old?' he asked. I said, 'Around 1760.' He asked if I was English. I said no. He said, 'I know folksongs in a number of languages. I can sing you something in Swedish.' I said I was hurrying back to do some work. He asked what I do, and I told him I write words for music. He then asked if I'd heard of Alfredo Le Pera, the greatest writer of tango lyrics (wrote lyrics for Carlos Gardel), and then he recited from memory a poem about a man returning to a village where his first love lived. I was quite taken by the idea of this guy giving me a one-man recital in King Street at night. Mind you, he then said, 'You don't often meet Australian writers.'

Little things I have learned:

- You don't need to wear sunglasses here, even though it's bright.
- They have rocking chairs in the waiting areas at Savannah airport.
- Stephen Sondheim is a lingua franca. When I was at a Savannah high school with some opera singers last Thursday, and they announced that they were going to sing some Sweeney Todd, the kids all cheered.
- This is a land of whole hog. This high school I'm talking of is a public performing-arts high school. You have to audition to get in. After the opera singers had finished their recital, the kids offered their wares in exchange. A quartet of teenage boys got up and sang some barbershop quartet numbers they'd been rehearsing. Then the entire choir sang us the Lutkin Benediction - 'The Lord bless you and keep you...' They encircled us. The guests on either side of me wiped away tears. The opera company director who sat next to me said, 'That's America for you. We don't just do some of it; we do all of it.'