Halfway down the Danube

Walking down Strada Roma

Sunday evening I took the boys for a walk down Strada Roma.

We live in a residential neighborhood where all the streets are named after capitals: Strada Paris, Strada Londra, Strada Roma and Stockholm and Brasilia. I like walking down Strada Roma because it's lined with lovely old houses with little yards full of overgrown flowers and cats. It's nice to walk there by myself; it's even nicer with the boys, because there's always something happening. A woman sweeping the sidewalk; a man too drunk to walk straight. Birds bathing in a sidewalk puddle. Two teenagers working on a car (with power tools!). Children on bicycles, a friendly dog, interesting bugs. Something.

At the end of Strada Roma, just south of Piatsa Dorobant' (that's the one with the bust of Brancusi), is a high school. The high school is shaped like three sides of a rectangle, with the street going past it making the fourth. Inside the rectangle is the school yard: a concrete playground with a couple of basketball courts and an open area where boys play soccer. The playground is separated from the street by a high wall with a couple of gates in it.

So we're walking along, David in the stroller and Alan holding my hand, and we've just reached the schoolyard gate. We pause to look inside. Alan likes to go inside and watch the boys playing ball. A car is going slowly down the street behind us. I tell Alan we won't go inside, we have to go home, but we can watch the ball players for a minute or two. One of the boys kicks the ball high. Alan turns to say something to me --

and BANG! There's a crash from the street, just a few meters behind us. I whirl around, and there are little bits of shiny silver glass /everywhere/. It takes a moment to figure out what's happened: the soccer ball has gone high over the wall and, by unlucky chance, has hit the side mirror of the one car that was going down the street. Hit it dead on, and hard: the mirror has shattered explosively.

The car stopped dead. The ball came down from high in the air, bounced off the curb, dribbled slowly into the middle of the street. There was silence for perhaps a count of three.

Then a young woman got out of the car and stared at the place where her mirror had been. The ball was dribbling slowly to a halt in the middle of the street. Some boys had climbed up on the wall between playground and sidewalk; they started to point and yell, in that peculiar hooting way that is unique to teenage boys worldwide.

The young woman suddenly grabbed the ball, threw it into her car, and got back inside. Then -- to cries of despair from the ball players -- she drove off. Everyone stared after the car until it disappeared around the corner into the piatsa with the bust of Brancusi.

And that was that.

Posted by douglas at October 26, 2004 09:03 PM