this little light

brooklyn is an opportunity to experience anything. and flatbush, right in its middle, is everything, but crowded right up onto everything else. if you live in the middle of flatbush and you happen to be fortunate enough to have found an apartment in one of the old victorians whose butts meet up with the subway cut, you can get everything, right off the back porch. you can get a live rooster running down your street and a guy being chased by cops on the railroad track below your house. there are opportunities, i tell you.

this evening, i was in the bedroom at the back of the house. we sleep just a few feet away from the rumbling b and q trains and ignore it all, but tonight when i walked into the room i heard something at the end of one of the trains. gospel sounding something. and i don't mean that awful whining that passes for gospel some places. i mean serious, get happy, jump around, slap jesus on the back kind of gospel. so i went out onto the back porch to investigate. the singing got louder. there was clapping. quite a few voices and all of them fitting together to make a little song pretty big. this little light of mine, i'm gonna let it shine... i kept trying to look through the trees, through the fence, looking for those voices. i never did see them, but they were right across the train cut, in the backyard where, three years ago, i saw a man pee off the back fence into the cut in broad daylight. a man who lived there, yelling while he peed over the fence. i got the impression maybe that man had moved away. these folks didn't seem like fence peeing types. when they got tothe hide it under a bushel part of the song, a woman's clear voice hollered NO! in response. this was my favorite part of the song when i was little. we'd stand up all of us and scream it as loud as we could. anytime you get to yell in church is a good time. and any time you get you yell no in church is a serious good time. and then the b train came through on purpose like a tornado. and then nothing. but i stood there in the dark on the porch a while just in case.