Busan Journal, Day 6

As I rounded the corner by the law building on my walk down from our hilltop dormitory, I heard the faint strains of music. It is early on a rainy day, our third in a row, and a national holiday, Sam Il Jul, so the streets were otherwise deserted. What a joy to hear what I took to be live music, a single instrument coloring a moment otherwise silent, damp, and gray.

The route to my new office takes me alternately downhill and then laterally across the face of the slope three times. As I approached an open, three layered parking garage that sits beside a series of tennis courts, I could tell that the music was coming from within the parking garage itself, then that it was a saxophone.

Immediately I felt affinity with the lone musician. I thought first of recent experiences hearing musicians in London, performing in walkways of tube stations or the pedestrian "subways" in the center of the city. Then I thought of the lone musician I had come across in Highbury Fields, our local park, practicing his trumpet in the cold twilight of mid-November. He was good, I must say, but no doubt the trumpet makes poor company indoors when you share thin walls, ceilings, and floors with a less tolerant audience.

Then I spotted him, or part of him, sitting on a folding chair on the lower deck of the parking garage, facing a fold-away music stand, practicing a classical piece unfamiliar to me, his huge bright brass horn almost touching the ground. I could not see his face and he did not stop while I stood for a moment in the rain, but I wanted to applaud. I would have tossed the coins from my pocket into his open case had he been closer and the way down accessible.

We have been here ten days. Life on campus has been quiet, although clearly campus life does not stop between semesters. Yesterday, new students arrived. The campus buzzed with life for the first time. A line of cars, bumper to bumper, snaked oh-so-slowly up the single narrow street toward the dorms; students armed with big yellow badges and light batons directed traffic; and hundreds of parents dragged suitcases and their somber kids toward their new rooms and this new life at college.

Now, this national holiday and a deserted campus. The lone musician with his over-sized saxophone filled the quiet air with notes we often call plaintive, melancholy, wistful. But what I hear is the joy of the introspective life, the shared emotion of this moment in which two lives understand something through music that we could not express in words.

I have been asked many times how the teaching is going. I would say it is going fine. I am having a great time with my saxophone, wailing away in the parking garage with its wonderful amplifying acoustics. On Thursday I get to do it again for my first real audience.