Friday July 12th, 2013

The exercise:

Write four lines of prose about: the busker.

Managed to get through last night without anything else being stolen. Hurray?

Heading back to the market tomorrow with nearly 300 pounds of apricots, about 60 pounds of Transparent apples, several heads of cabbage, and 8 pints of raspberries. What else? Right, also harvested some bags of our tender green beans. Oh, and we should have a couple boxes of gold plums to sell as well.

Looking forward to being there again after skipping last weekend.

Mine:

An upside down hat sits patiently on the pavement before him as he tunes his guitar. It waits to receive the day's wage, collecting spare change from passersby who barely hear a single note he plays. They drop coins out of habit, not because they appreciate what he does.

And he tells himself, over and over again, that he doesn't mind.

2 comments:

Greg said...

All that produce sounds lovely, and the Transparent apples sound rather nice too! We have Bramleys over here as cooking apples (apparently they're tricky to grow as they require three different trees to pollinate), and I've always had a soft spot for the delicious acidity they have.
Well done on keeping the burglars at bay :) By the way, if you were going to get a dog to help protect the property now is probably a good time to get a puppy and have it bond with Max :)
Your poor busker! I hope he doesn't lose hope :)

The busker
Most of the time he played Beatles' covers, more for himself than for the tourists crowding past. Sometimes he switched it up a little, especially on rainy days, and played some classic rock instead. But today he was in a bad mood and some idiot had just emptied their Starbucks cup into his guitar case, so he slipped his earplugs in. Then he played the brown note.

[Ref: brown note

Marc said...

Greg - I will be sure to not tell Max about your puppy suggestion :P

On a related note, Kat's aunt and uncle in Penticton who we stayed with on Monday night have a tiny little dog. It was barking at Max and he thought it was hilarious - he just laughed and laughed and laughed.

Poor dog, that's got to be a little demoralizing :P

I'd say your busker had good reason to resort to the brown note. Though I'm glad I was not withing hearing distance when it happened!