The Korean woman who ran the little grocery store in the middle of my block wasn’t about to win any popularity contests with her neighbors, even before she had a public telephone installed out front. It was ostensibly a neighborhood store, the neighborhood being Ravenswood Manor, a tiny island of comfortable suburbia surrounded by less palatable sections of the north side of the city. But why anybody would shop there was beyond me.
The woman ignored him, blithely wiping her hands together.
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She spun on her heel and launched into a tirade in Korean. Finished, she waved at him as if swatting a fly away. The driver, speechless, got into his car and drove off. At that moment I vowed never to buy even a newspaper from her again.
Soon neighbors on the block were being awakened night after night by people using the public phone. At 3 AM the sound of coins dropping into the slot sounded like garbage-can lids being dropped from the roof of a three-story building. We heard every word of every late-night conversation.
One night a neighbor sneaked out and put an epoxylike substance in the phone’s coin slot. The next day a service technician repaired it. Several nights later another man, the one married to the light sleeper, stood in his living room holding a pair of wire cutters. “You know what I’d like to do,” he told me, grinning mischievously.
“Nothing else is working,” the man’s wife said.
“It’s empowerment,” I told him. “Take control of your world. Take positive action!”
