The magic whistle

When you live in the city, every few days you hear a lovely, flute-type whistle that reminds me strongly of an old Nintendo game called Zelda. In reality, this noise is created by the men who wheel around their sharpening stone, hooked up to a bicycle wheel, to announce their availabilty to sharpen your knives. I've always enjoyed the noise, but never found much use for these guys cause I never had a decent set of knives. Now that I do, I live in an area where the knife sharpeners don't frequent. On the way into town the other day, we saw one of these men pushing his wheel along the sidewalk and pulled the car over to request that he make a stop by our house. He had a slightly confused smile on his face, but agreed that he woud come by in the next week. That week passed and I gave up on ever having sharp knives again. But, low and behold, upon returning from a walk around the neighborhood the other day, our trusty knife-sharpening friend was camped outside our front door, sharpening the knives of our neighbors below. I thanked him profusely for coming and ran upstairs to grab my block of dull knives. We watched him pump the wheel and sharpen with skill, images of cutting meat and tomatoes with ease floating through my head. He charged us a little less than $2 for the 8 knives and promised he'd return in a few months. The picture above also shows the friendly and cheery Margarita, the maid that lives downstairs, whom we have come to appreciate over the past few months. She's taken care of our cats, given us advice on markets and prices for knife sharpening, as well as lending needed kitchen equipment. We love having that kind of relationship with her, hoping one day we might be able to talk of more serious things. We are slowly growing into a better friendship with the neighbors, our landlords, and appreciate their continued help with the apartment and desire to know us better.

I couldn't resist the picture of Scotty and Cheddar reading Future Grace together. Doesn't it warm your heart?