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| More thoughts from Joe Brooks |
I don't know about you other people, but I
cast a five by five shadow, and while I like the
summer heat and all that, I find this “unusual” Taipei weather a bit wearing. However, have you ever noticed the funny
things that people do when the weather gets hot, either in an attempt to get
cool or maybe it’s just the heat that gets them.
Everyone has noticed the relief-hungry natives who sleep in the grassy
parkways as well as on the cement in an effort to capture a few stray cool breezes
which their second-floor quarters would never get. Going out South Chung Shan Road the other night, my
pedicab almost ran over a body sprawled in the middle of the road. After assuring ourselves that “it” was alive
and uninjured, I asked the individual
why he slept there.
“Aren’t you afraid a car will come along and smack you into the middle
of the next re-incarnation?” I
queried.
"I’ve been sleeping both here and on the cement curb for more than four
years now. Last summer, when I was sleeping
on the grassy part of the parkway I was bitten by a water buffalo which was
pulling a honeycart. But nothing’s
happened to me here – yet.”
Having nothing more to say in that conversation I told my pedicab boy,
“Drive on, Kwan.”
Stopped at the baseball park during a scorcher, (the day, not the
baseball game) and sweated out a few innings.
Noticed that several young stalwarts were not facing in the direction of
the game, so I turned my head to the focal point of interest. Two “local” girls had driven up on bicycles
for the same purpose, I suppose, as the rest of us. Dropping the bike-stand, they balanced
themselves on the seat with their feet propped on the handlebars.
What with the hot
weather and maybe the laundry slow in coming back, the shapely, highly matured
and rather beautiful girls had not worn anything – that is, anything – under
their street dress. To add to the
comfort and confusion, or maybe I’m writing this in the wrong order, they had
taken off their shoes, and their bare, little – toes – were wiggling in the sun
like mad.
Suddenly aware of the
attention, rapt and wrapt, which had fastened itself upon them, one girl nudged
the other and whispered in her ear.
Whereupon they both giggled self-consciously, sedately draped their
head-bandannas over their feet and conversations observed, kept on watching the
game. Nobody knows who won the game but
now I know why so many people are baseball fans in Taipei.
One of the cutest
hot-weather dodges I ever saw was played on a city cop near a certain water
fountain in Keeling. The little street-gamin
were filling the air with their happy cries, the cop was sweating wishing it
was time to go home and several little tykes were plotting grave things.
Suddenly one of them,
chosen be some mysterious means which kids use to select martyrs, unwrapped a bandage
from his leg, roughed the partly healed abrasions from what was probably
yesterday’s casualty, wrinkled up his face and burst into mournful howls. Limping around the water fountain he
presented himself to the weary policeman and moaned out his tale of woe with
punctuating sobs, furtive swipes at his nose and dramatic pointings at his
injured member.
Perhaps he was tired of
standing in the sun, perhaps he had had the same game played on him many times
before, perhaps it was a trick that really worked, but the cop took the little
kid over to the local police station for the application of emergency bandages. The treatment at any rate took almost an
hour, with the cop sitting in the window drinking tea and discussing the state
of crime in the world today.
And in plain sight,
where they appeared the moment his back was turned, the water fountain was
filled to overflowing and splashing, capering and squealing kids taking
advantage of that precious hour of forbidden time.
Come to think of it, who would have had the heart to kick them out,
huh?
Reprinted with permission.
COPYRIGHT 1955 BY JOE BROOKS
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Joe Brooks wrote a column for the ChinaPost newspaper in the mid 1950s.
This story and other articles found in this Blog came from his book,
"From A Yankee Notebook in Taiwan"
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