Street Musician's Banter

I’ll give you a buck if you play a song I like.

I’ll give you a buck if you play a song you like – and you play it well.

I’ll give you a buck if you make me smile.

I’ll give you a buck if you make me cry.

I’ll give you five if you let me sit in – and you have to give it back if I’m good.

We could be here all day and all night.

Here’s a buck, just play.

I’ll sing along if I feel like it for free.

I sat on a plantar not far.

She tuned her painted guitar.

She then sang a tune I had heard,

but I didn’t hear every word.

Then she looked my way and thanked me

and I hadn’t given her any money,

but I gave her my name, when she asked,

and then she did the same.

Here’s the verse,

if your ears are perked.

Her name is Linda and she wondered out loud

if we might be related after I had jokingly said

that the Bert character on Sesame Street was no kin of mine.

Linda said her family went back to Scandinavia,

I said mine came from Holland.

So our hair and our skin were close relatives after all.

We chatted a bit,

but I didn’t gather that she was an anthropologist by profession.

She had a nice voice.

Pardon me. I’m certainly not satisfied with how that sounds.

Linda could carry a tune all the way across the sidewalk

and have it echo all the way back to the other side of the street

with change to spare,

which was only in part what she seemed to be after.

She came to sing.

I asked her if she knew any Leonard Cohen.

She said she did, but not by heart. She smiled.

She offered me her book, it was titled,

‘Hard Times’ and something or other.

So I asked if she knew the tune by that name

written by Stephen Foster.

Linda said she’d like to sing it,

although I didn’t know her well enough to

feel what she was feeling.

Linda sang the song through

and along the way made a buck or two.

I sang a little harmony on the chorus.

She offered that she’d seen me around.

And I had recognized the lime green bicycle I’d seen her riding before.

Finally I nodded, turned, and walked away.

She had more tunes to play

and change to collect.

An economist would say our exchange had been worth a buck –

minus the ever creeping inflation.

But I didn’t notice any of their kind pausing if they walked by.

I never asked Linda if she knew any good old hymn tunes.

I was thinking of ‘Till we meet again.’

Linda was just a street musician,

and I was a passerby.

A little music in the air,

more if you wanted to listen.