From rural little Ohio where the nights can get really quiet, a move to the city was pretty drastic. But, there is something to be said about where I live. I mean, I live in the Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, C.A.B.A., but I don't live downtown. Additionally, there's no notable skyline of the city. That being said, I don't feel like there is constant traffic whizzing by my window (which is impossible because it opens to a courtyard 3 floors below). Anyways, the one notable thing when I am in my house are all the sirens and alarms that go off: not many police cars (corruption) and no ambulances (probably because their all always occupied with some public transit disaster.) (<< Exaggeration).
These sirens aren't your typical droning car alarms in the states: they are AWESOME. It's like you are in a Mario game, or a broken Nokia cell phone (which never happens, so maybe a Samsung) from 1996. For you music connoisseurs, it's usually phrases of 2 measures in 4/4 that these tunes alternate. There are probably 8 to 10 different melodies that are played, some sirens, some like cliché UFO sounds, some Mario tunes and all sound like they're just being played one after the other when you want to change the ringtone on a 1996 Nokia phone. (Better? I didn't say it was broken this time.) As many different melodies as there are, I have been conditioned to know which comes next and hum along, as if it were a CD I overplayed and know which song should come after John Mayer's Heartbreak Warfare. There was even one car alarm that played the William Tell Overture but an electronic version.
The shrieking garage alarms that warn of a car coming out or turning in all chime in at different frequencies and with the Doppler effect (because I walk soooo fast......... .) is just a delightfully hair-raising sound. Correction: was. Now, it is just something that happens. This morning was different though; the reason I wanted to write on this. It wasn't the cars, or the wheezing buses, or the honking taxis and cat calls from men driving by, horns resounding the "New York minute", squeaking school buses, wailing alarms, screeching brakes or zooming motor cycles that got my attention, it was the crying boy. And it's not because it was just a crying boy, but because he sounded like the crying boy from Dr. Seuss's It's Grinch Night who was taken from the slide by his mom and forgot his toy when the "sour-sweet wind" blew. (If you're familiar, delightful. If not and you want to know, check out minute 2:10. It really is distinct, and needless to say, I chuckled.)
No longer is it the drone of the cars through the puddles, the careening buses, the speeding taxis, the crazy motos, the howling engines of dilapidated cars, the sleekness of the new ones, or the people grumbling, mumbling and talking their lunfardo that is still such a challenge, that shock me, because now on the 20th of March 2012, I affirm more and more that this is life.
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