Rooftops and ice shavings

(To those of you who read both here and friendster, yes many are just repeated in both, but there is enough of a difference in the people on here to warrant it being posted both places sometimes, so thats how Im doing it)-
I was sitting on my orange and green striped couch in my top story brownstone apartment in Brooklyn, four floors up and I was reading this book about world war II. This being Brooklyn most noise no longer catches my ear long enough to make me put things down and find its source. But then I noticed the untrained saxaphone belting out over the street and thought to myself ' this is not someone's cd or record recording' because it wasnt bad, just untrained and hesitant. So I got up. We have three windows in the front of our apartment overlooking the street below and since we are four floors up and the building across the way is only three, we've got this kind of view. Anyway, I looked into my neighbors windows and looked downward to find the saxaphone player but couldn't from the central window so I moved to the left one thinking if I could place the sound better I could look in the right direction. And then it struck me. Look on the rooftops. And one street over directly in fron of me is this white apartment building with a ladder reaching to the roof from the fire escape in front. It stands maybe five or six stories, hard to say since below it is blocked by other apartment buildings closer to where I am, and there on the rooftop, glinting in the setting sun, is the saxaphonist. turning and moving slowly as if he's pacing out his next notes, trying to find his way to a rythm. And when he finds one he sticks with it for a few rifs, repeating it over and over, then moving to the next. Like I said, he is untrained. And then the strangest thing happens. I am sitting in my windowsill at this point listening to him. It is just wide enough to sit and long enough to bend me knees just slightly to get my whole self in. My white flowered couch is directly below me leaving me a way to climb down. Anyway from down the street comes a small hispanic man and his smaller daughter, with her long hair in a ponytail, and they are pushing this aqua blue metal cart with a wide blue and yellow umbrella attached to it, with palm trees gracing each triangle making up the umbrella. In the center of the cart is a bin of ice for shaving and around the ice are these glass (i can hear the way they clink against one another) containers holding the various flavors. and they are walking down the center of the street and a man stops them, and asks for an ice. He is in a panama hat and sandals. Its around 8pm and the subway station down the street is letting out workers in small clusters every ten minutes. A older woman in scrubs wither her voluminous braids pinned in a greying swirl at the top of her head, shuffles along- tired in her orthopedic white shoes. Two men in shorts and baseball caps pause for a conversation out front on of their gates, and mothers with babies and strollers and a purpose move along the sidewalk. A girl with a navy blue bandana on her head like a kerchief and her jeans cuffed at the bottom slowly rides on her bicycle down the other side towards somewhere else. And while my initial thought is to laugh and think this all very cliche, part of me realizes its actually happening and something in me warms in the cooling evening air and the word home surfaces for just a brief moment before I catch myself being too idealistic and sentimental and turn back to my book, after all my own home has never been like this and I cannot lay claim to some greater feeling of familiarity and belonging here. Only the saxaphonist has not stopped and while the italian ice vendor has gone on his way I can't help but think, 'yes, now this is a neighborhood' and even if I am only a part of it in some infinitely small way and for a terribly brief millisecond in the grand timing of things, I am grateful I have had the opportunity to be a witness to what all those brilliant authors and painters and photographers invoke so much more eloquently than I even could.