Montgomery station
At the Montgomery station, there are usually buskers competing with each other during the morning rush.
There is the accordion-bass duo, who I remember as being good if forgettable.
The man in a dirty T-shirt who sings old soul tunes, strumming hard on a slighly off-key guitar, who gets people moving down the escalators to sing to themselves, even if they don't give him money.
The lone mariachi in jeans and buttoned shirt, belting out half-hearted songs like the half-hearted workday it is.
And then there's the old Chinese man, stooped over his violin.
I have to look it up: it's an erhu, and he's playing it standing up, quietly filling the in-between silences as other buskers finish, now and then jarringly filling the echoing station with his Eastern scales against the accordion or soul guitar.
The jazz duo rolls their eyes and shout a little in his direction; the homeless soul guitarist sings louder.
Sometimes I see him at the Civic Center station, where he's got a space more or less to himself, and he concentrates, concentrates, and plays.
Maybe it's the acoustics, maybe it's his old fingers, maybe it's the fact that his erhu looks like it was made from wire and a cigar box.
It's horrible sound.
He saves himself for the Montgomery station and the Financial District morning rush, obviously.
Even though he's in competition with other people with lives just as hardscrabble as his, he saws and saws away, and for some reason it sounds beautiful then, and his playing can make you think of brushstroked green hills, oxen in the fields, dewy pines and cloudy fishing villages, rather than the possible Shanghai slum, or the more likely Mission slum, the musical education from a remote school or even taught in the family almost lost amid all that scratched metal and grimy plastic.
I've never given him money; I gave some change once to a man playing classical guitar at the Civic Center station.
I think I've never given him money because his music communicates such sadness that I'm hurrying down the escalator before I can think too much on what it took for this music to reach me in a dirty BART station.
It's a hard way to make a buck, and a hard life.
Even though no one seems to enjoy what he's playing then, and his songs communicating such loss can't really compete with old blues songs on public transit, I'll have to give him money sometime.
It's useful to be reminded of what's beautiful and what's already lost.