Chapter 1 

"This place is a carnival of communities. Let me tell you a story. When I was down and out, between jobs, I used to go down to that big library on Kittredge Street and spend the day reading and pondering. Well, down in the bowels of the thing was a reading room, a spacious open area that had the newspapers of every major paper in the world hanging on racks so you could pick out a publication and take it back to one of a dozen or so stations that had high stools to sit in front of what looked like drafting tables. Then you could spread the paper on the table and read the Times or the Post, Pravda, they had them all. So I'm down there one early afternoon and I noticed some movement to my right and look over to see this little black guy, a midget I guess you'd call him, and he's dressed up in a white uniform of some sort with a white bag and white tennis racket. He struggles up the stool as a mature kid would and proceeds to read his paper. Well, this happened over a period of several weeks and after a while we began to acknowledge each other with nods when our eyes met. He was an older man, muscular with a fashionable afro haircut. So I start to think to myself. "I wonder if there are any other midgets in town? I guess you call them little people now that sounds better. But I became fascinated by this fellow. We didn't have what you'd consider a conversation after all we were there to read our papers but I couldn't help visualizing some tale of this little guy and how he'd come to this fine city. One day he doesn't show up. And then the next and I figure that's it for him, perhaps he's moved on to another city. At that time I was living down in West Berkeley and would get all wound up from reading so much downtown and then unwind by walking from the library to my little apartment down on Dwight. One night I made that walk my brain buzzing with the daily news from Asia, mixed in with this awful tension you get when money is the big elephant in the room and the world races around you as if everything is good and perfect as it is. I had this anxiety for a long time and would walk briskly home trying to convince myself I was on the verge of wonderful things. So I'm walking down Kittredge to Grove and pass in front of Berkeley High School. And across the street are public tennis courts all lit up at night. I could hear the balls being whacked and a few voices so crossed the street to watch them play tennis. That was another excellent way to relieve these tensions: go find a game and watch it as if it were the most important thing in the world at that moment. So I went over and peered into the chain link fence they had around the place and to my astonishment I saw every court was manned by midgets, male and female. There were at least twenty of them batting the tennis balls back and forth. I thought immediately, "There’s a community here!" And so I felt uplifted as I made my way down Dwight to my sad little apartment that here, in this city, a community of midgets had found the audacity to live as normal human beings and I kind of did a salute to the little black guy I had met in the library.

David Eide
January 24, 2014