The corn man

The corn man cometh.



Each afternoon, the voice comes. It first becomes audible from a few blocks away, and gradually the volume increases as its owner winds his way through the streets to his eventual destination of our short and winding road. The call has clearly been honed and perfected through years of practice: without fail, it rings out with precisely the same cadence and pitch every time.

I can hear him from my bedroom with the window shut. I can hear him above Lynyrd Skynyrd blasting from my flatmate's computer. I can hear him every day, rain or shine, regardless of temperature. The corn man: just what you think it is. He's a street vendor, in the same vein as the simitcis that I've blogged about before, who wanders the street selling corn.

Sometimes I watch him from the window as he meanders up our street. He occasionally rests from his chanted advertisement to look up at the buildings, as if expecting a housewife to call out to him and then come running down to collect her corn. But no one ever comes. In over two months of living in this flat and watching this man push his corn cart up the hill past my house, I have never seen him attract a single customer. Who knows how long he wanders every afternoon, or how much corn he sells on an average day. Is it enough to make a profit and justify his long hours of corn peddling? Probably not. Turkish people may have relied on these street vendors for fresh produce fifty years ago, or perhaps even twenty, but now there are about five grocery stores within two blocks of my house, all with reasonably priced vegetables. The corn man seems obsolete, a village relic that doesn't quite fit in with the sports cars and skyscrapers of Ankara.

But this man is a great example of patience and perseverance, because he never fails to come with his corn. Whether or not he sells any is a mystery to me, but he is a faithful visitor to our street every single day, and his voice is a touch that makes this cold, impersonal big city feel a little smaller.