Last night I ventured on the streets. Apprehensive about traveling the next day, I sough company and a beer . The Upper West Side is rich with life’s stories. The person on the bar stool to your left could be a professor, a currency trader, a lost soul or all of them together.
On St. Patrick's Day, I chatted with a hotel consultant who traveled the world and was troubled by an overweight black woman on the M60 bus. She was ranting about Irish being drunken potato eaters. Just then a smartly dress young woman came over to the bar to order a Guinness. She could not help but overhear the distressing comments coming from my new found friend in his defense of Irish honor. She introduced herself as a professor of culture at Columbia and proceeded to add context and understanding to the encounter on the bus. Her cell phone rang and was off rendezvousing with her sister. It was like a finely crafted scene from a movie all happening in real time. Last night was a mood altering adventure. Sometimes you can just look into a persons face and know that you can communicate. Like Malcolm Gladwell’s book blink , all in the blink of an eye. With in a short period of time we were chatting about family and faith. He was a follower of an organized faith and me trying to graft my religion onto my understanding of the physical world.