A man digs a deep hole in my front lawn, next to the street. It’s a neat hole cut along a spray-painted rectangle. While he digs, the man sings on and off to classic rock on a phone app. Aerosmith, then maybe Sammy Hagar, who is a rock god in St. Louis.
Soon other men come. They put orange plastic tubing into the hole, then thread it along the clot of underground cable that is already there.
Their app streams Mexican hip hop. They give each other instructions in Spanish. Another man walks by. Everyone switches to English to talk with the new arrival, who has a different accent. He could be Bosnian. St. Louis has largest Bosnian population outside of Bosnia. They all bob a little to the infectious Spanish rap.
In a few days, once all the holes have been dug and orange tubing snakes through the neighborhood, the men will push and pull fiber optic cable through the tubing. It reminds me of the way I push and pull that drawstring on my son’s hoodie, weaving it back through its casing after it got yanked out in the wash.
When I do chores like that, I listen to music on You-Tube: Enya, Bach’s choral Saint Matthew’s Passion, or clicking and re-clicking a video of Steve Winwood and Eric Clapton doing “Can’t Find My Way Home,” which is a Platonic form of good. Cables get electrons to the phone, lyrics in every language, beats from every culture. The fiber optic cables will get the sounds there even faster, to ease the push and pull of any human task.
Cable in the street: This is how we sing.
— Dana Delibovi