Twenty Years on the Same Concrete

The ferry to Santo Antão leaves at seven, so the dock wakes before the city does. I drink my coffee standing up at five forty, three spoons of sugar, and listen to the gulls arguing over something near the fish market. By six I am at the gate with my card in my hand. Nothing about this morning is new, and that is the part I like.

The cargo changes. Some days it is sacks of cement that coat your throat white by noon; some days it is frozen fish that make the whole quay smell like a different country. You learn a box by its weight, not by its label. You learn which of the young ones will take the heavy end without being asked.

What the Shoulder Remembers

I have been at this twenty years. My right shoulder sits lower than it used to; I noticed it in a photograph before I noticed it in the mirror. In the morning it complains for ten minutes and then it forgets. The body is more forgiving than people think, and less forgiving than it was at thirty.

A crate does not care what kind of day you are having. That is why I trust it.

The hands are the other record. Thick pads at the base of the fingers, a pale line across the left palm from a wire that slipped years ago. When people see them they assume I work construction. I say, water and boxes, and they nod as if that explained everything, and in a way it does.

Lunch is at eleven thirty because the heat decides it. Rice, fish, a little oil and vinegar, eaten in the shade of the shed with the same four men I have eaten with for a decade. Nobody talks much. We watch the water and the cranes and the tourists coming down the ramp with their suitcases, sunburnt and cheerful, and we are not unkind about it.

After the Whistle

At home I wash the salt off and sleep forty minutes, never more, or the evening is ruined. Then the guitar comes out of the case. It is a cheap thing with a repaired crack in the belly, and it sounds better than it should. I play scales badly until my fingers remember which kind of work they are doing now.

Rope and string both cut the hand. Only one of them answers back.

There is a difference in the calluses, if you look. Rope makes them wide and flat. Strings leave a narrow ridge on the fingertips, and after a hard week at the port the ridge goes soft and has to be built again. Twenty years of both, and the hands have settled into a compromise I did not plan.

People ask whether I would quit the dock if the music paid. I say I would keep half the dock, because the songs would go thin otherwise. Whatever I know about a slow tempo, I learned from carrying something heavy without dropping it.