“Tin, Pannier Alley”

VazamBam

by Vassilis Zambaras

“Small Street Song”

Below me, the
tin-

smith bangs his
hammer, the

old man sells
grapes, sweet

he says, try
some, you’ll see

sunshine! his donkey
sways in

time you can almost
taste it.

Meligalas, Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—7/12/10—This long gone ancient building housed my language school for one year (1975-76) until the licensing committee inspected it and found it woefully inadequate to serve as anything, let alone an English Knowledge Factory; I had suspected as much when I rented the dilapidated entire second floor above the tin-smith’s shop, but was in a hurry to begin my adventures in Teaching English as a Second Language before the public schools opened in September, and couldn’t be bothered about the creaking, crooked flooring, the rotting, stuccoed walls of the three rooms painted respectively a pastel yellow, blue, and pink and the ornately carved wooden ceilings that buckled ominously above—the Zambaras Institute for the Corruption of Language (ZICL) had to forge ahead, come crumbling walls or high, buckling ceilings.

My office was directly over the east window of the tinsmith’s shop and any reading or writing of poetry was done accompanied by the intermittent banging of that instrument made famous in a song by Trini Lopez back in the early 60’s. Had he heard it? Probably not, but even if he had, he couldn’t have understood it, since the only English he knew was what filtered down to him through the cracks in the flooring; in other words, It was Chinese to him—the Greek version of that popular hackneyed phrase uttered by so many Westerners everywhere whenever confronted with what sounds to them like so much gibberish. Fortunately, we came to an agreement whereupon, unlike Trini, he would use his hammer only in the mornings, leaving the lighter, less noisy cutting and welding jobs for the afternoon and evening hours when I would be teaching English.

Not everything was negative about the building, however; even if the office was pastel pink, it did have a great view of the narrow, busy street in front so, in between intermittent slams of the tin-smith’s hammer and reading and/or writing, I spent considerable time observing the foot traffic going by. It was during one of these mornings at grape harvesting time that I spied an elderly fruit vendor hawking his wares; his four-legged partner leading the way, hauling two panniers full of grapes and some balancing scales that were dangling from the rear of the saddle.

Mongers such as this elderly gentleman were frequent sights in Greek villages up to the late 60’s, and sold everything from hardware to watermelons (not carried on the same animal, of course, and not by the same monger); their numbers becoming scarcer as their four-legged partners dwindled and the automotive (r)age stepped in to fill the void. Now, most mongers are fruit-and-vegetable-vending gypsies in Nissan or Toyota pick-ups whose blaring loudspeakers can be heard early in the morning, late in the afternoon and early in the evening all over this land.

No such amplified sound for this particular vendor—all he had was his unwired voice and he used it so effectively that I heard it loud and clear over the banging of the hammer, and imagined myself tasting the succulent grapes waiting in the baskets, glistening in the sun.

I was almost swayed by the temptation to drop everything and rush out into the street before man and donkey turned the corner and vanished, but it was high time for me to turn back to my musings and apply the finishing touches  to my small street song.