The Street Violinist

Remember when this blog used to be funny? Me either.

So if you've been following my blog for a while, you're familiar with my continual hunt for what it is I believe in. If you're not, you can find a couple examples here and here, and then also in the majority of my posts from the last, oh, year. I still don't know where I stand, but something pretty cool happened today. Those of you who believe in a zombie carpenter and his PLAN (which I often imagine on spreadsheets, probably in no small part because when I think "paternal" I think of my financial analyst father) will immediately shoe horn what happened into your belief system in a very easily explainable way. Those of you who are devoutly atheist will do the same (shoe horn, I mean), and those of you who are, like me, devout agnostics (at least now I've come up with a term for myself - I really, adamantly, am not sure) will also probably just go  "huh." But me... this I'm writing down so I can hold on to it.

Today, I had a job interview. A demo lesson with a language school, to be precise, and I'd written the lesson plan to be used at least a week and a half ago. So I wasn't very familiar with it, and it went jerkingly, at best. Also, I boarded an incorrect example of the future simple "going to" construction, and then when I caught my mistake, wrongly labeled the present continuous as the present simple. Then, to make the whole thing worse, my TTT (teacher talking time - IS BAD THING) was abysmally high, and I mistook "I failed the test because I hadn't studied enough" for the 3/2 conditional. Which, if you're familiar with English grammar, you know is really really wrong. Despite all this, the woman seemed to imply I would be moving on to the next stage of the job application process (which I've effectively just jinxed). My mood, leaving the office, was not the best.

But Prague is Prague, and I had no other plans, and a thunder storm imbued with the greatest wrath of Thor (maybe not greatest wrath, but probably akin to "MY HARD DRIVE GOT WIPED BY A VIRUS! CURSE YOU, PIRATE BAY!") cooled down the city for the first time in about two weeks, making walking the long way home not only feasible, but pleasant.

Now, most of the time when I walk anywhere, I have my headphones on, which are not sound cancelling. So in the lull between songs, I can hear what's happening on the street. A new song on my phone was about to start when I passed by an Italian violinist. I know he was Italian because in addition to being olive colored, he was wearing very nice shoes. Don't point out the logic, I'm sticking with it. I paused, both my walk and my phone, to listen to the last couple of bars of the song he'd been playing. He finished, and I would have moved on like the rest of the crowd, but I paused for some reason. I'd like to say it was a premonition, but more likely it was that I like classical music and he played very well. The crowd passed on to the next street performer, leaving me standing in the street, waiting for him to start. We made eye contact, and the violinist... he smiled. Smiled like he knew exactly what kind of day I was having, and had just the thing I needed. Setting his bow back on the strings, he started playing Ave Maria. Having not grown up Catholic, I don't know why there's about a thousand hymns called Ave Maria that all sound different, but this was the exact arrangement I have on my iPod, the one I queue up when I'm craving calm in Latin, days like today when I'm trying very hard not to kick myself over something stupid I did. And while I don't speak even a little Latin, I was able to fill in the basic sounds in my head while he played. As he played, too, he kept looking up with that smile, like he knew, he knew, exactly what effect this song was having on me. A crowd gathered, of course, but the whole time it was as if he was playing only to me.

Song finished, he bowed, and I dropped a fistful of coins into his case and I finally moved on.

Please don't write what you think this was. Because I don't care to hear "Oh! A Tender Mercy!' or "Oh! A Miracle!" or "Oh! A Random Occurrence Your Brain Is Ascribing Meaning To!" Don't wanna hear it. But those of you who worry about me, and I'm blessed in that you are multitude, know this: I'm fine, because little things like this keep happening. I'm not coming home, not quite yet, because every time reality weighs a little too heavily, Prague reminds me that we choose which reality it is we live in, and she'll let me choose a fairy tale if I want it.