This evening I got on the best subway car ever, heading for the workshop I was to give at the Integral Yoga Institute downtown. I saw the guy with the guitar, but this fellow was no mere troubador. Instead of just playing and singing, he was conducting a rousing music trivia contest, promising $2 to anyone who could name certain songs, cleverly chosen to be vaguely familiar–“I know I’ve heard that somewhere”–but nothing easily recognizable. Riders were right on maybe three out of five, although none ever got the $2.
Then he played something that took me way back, to teendom or tweendom or somewhere in
the far recesses of memory. “Isn’t that James Brown?” I asked the young woman to my right. “How should I know?” she responded. “I’m twenty-one.” Well, yeah, but I thought maybe her mom had sometimes played oldies. “James Brown!” I yelled out. “Hell, no,” the musician answered, with a look that said, “There’s pitiful and there’s pitiful, and that was just pitiful.” No one else had the answer so he gave us a hint: “It starts with a ‘W.'” Something filed in my brain from before I got wisdom teeth rose to the surface: “Wilson Pickett!” I cried with equal parts temerity and caution. “That’s right!” exclaimed the astounded guitarist, an African-American. “You been hangin’ out with black people!”
The young woman sitting beside me guessed the next song right. “And I’m only twenty-one,” she told him.
“This guy’s great,” I said to her. “I wish I’d brought my camera so I could do a video-blog.”
“You have a blog?” she asked, removing her earbuds. It was as I’d said a word that reached from antiquity to twenty-one. “I have a blog, too, a fashion blog. I’m on my way to two fashion parties,” she told me. And I shared with her about GirlieGirlArmy. a site for young (and young at heart) women who want to be glamazons and also live in a way that’s environmentally respectful and cruelty free. She wrote down the URL. We were communicating. She also shared that she’s a flexitarian, eating meat very rarely since last Christmas when the turkey thing got to her. She told me that she eats blueberries every day and I gave her the recipe for the raw blueberry pie I made the other night. It seems we live near each other, and I actually think we’ll keep in touch.
I write in Living a Charmed Life about carrying a little notebook and jotting down serendipities
that occur during the day. The musician/Wilson Pickett/new friend event was a serendipity triple-play. That subway line runs every 4 minutes. I could have been on the earlier train or, knowing me, the later one. And each train has dozens of cars, but I stepped onto that one. Serendipity. Or Divine appointment.
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