dancer in the park

I started out of the giant glass Starbucks door in downtown…well, let’s call it Shanghai, though it honestly could have been anywhere from Central Park West to Tel Aviv, with my grande non-fat no whip caramel macchiato (at least one thing is said the same all around the world), and I stepped onto the sidewalk to head home for the evening when I heard the faint sound of clicking coming from the park across the street.

My first reaction was that someone was tapping something on the ground, begging for money, but as I walked by, something about the slow, rhythmic, consistent sound of tapping drew on my curiosity and somewhere deep inside I knew that there was only one thing that it could be…there is only one thing that makes that sound.

As I hopped across the street and rounded the corner of the pathway into the park, I saw, in the shadows of a nearby light post, a man dressed in all black, slowly shuffling in tap shoes on the concrete. Next to him stood a woman in white sneakers watching and, every so often, shuffling with him, making no sound at all (but still in good form), and a small crowd of four friendly people sitting on the concrete bench, watching and talking. A few minutes later, my overpriced coffee half gone, the tapper stopped and took off his shoes. It was as if he had completed his warm up of simple, slow shuffles, but he wasn’t warming up to anything else. He was done.

So naturally, being thrust into such a serendipitous situation, I simply had to ‘say’ something. At which point I quickly remembered I was in China; where saying anything is more of a chore that one might think. But a few minutes of pantomiming in the shadows later, I deduced out that one of them was a teacher (still not sure which), and was able to tell him that his sounds were good, explain that I was also a tap dancer, and eventually deciphered what the woman was saying to me: “time step.” And so we did a few time steps in the park, after which I pulled out a 42nd Street postcard and pointed to it, and then to me, at which point their faces lit up and they began gathering around, looking, laughing, and talking.

After a good minute of her talking at me, we shared a moment when I realized I had no idea what she was saying and she, in turn, realized the same. We parted ways and I smiled at my luck for having walked home at that hour of the night. At the street corner, before I crossed, I looked back and was met with the waving goodbye to me. I didn’t understand a word she said, but just as the baristas had called out my drink order a few minutes earlier, we shared another language that needed no translation. I’d recognize that sound anywhere.