Saturday, August 16, 2014

Quiet Kids

The kid with the bike and the safety-cone orange doo-rag gets on the train at our door, while his friends, including the kid on the skateboard, get on one door down the car. They weren't super talkative on the platform, which is good - usually kids in a group on a platform spend a lot of energy being loud, trying to impress each other, freak out the squares, and it can be a little obnoxious.

But these kids seem relatively quiet, until one of them, the kid with the bike, starts gesturing grandly, but in a focused way, to the kid with the skateboard, who gestures back, and it quickly becomes apparent that they're signing to each other. Soon the whole lot of them are signing, silently holding animated conversations the length of the car, making jokes and joshing around, just kids, while one of their number grins and dribbles a basketball on the floor of the train, the rubbery, slightly metallic sound of the ball bouncing loud in the otherwise quiet of the subway.

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