I was riding home on the subway just now percolating on what I think tomrrow's LJ Idol topic will be and what I'll write for it, as I'll need to do that before I leave for Los Angeles, when a man got on with an electric saxaphone and started to play Amazing Grace.
I am not sure why, really, perhaps it was that the first note was so tentative, or his presentation of it was so slow, but it took maybe fifteen, twenty seconds for anyone to notice he was playing at all, and then the whole car went silent.
The woman across from me caught my eye, and then wiped tears from hers. Two teen boys with Nintendo DS'es paused and exchanged a glance with each other, one shrugging, when the awkwardness became apparent. The man next to me, reading the Koran, closed it to listen, and in a moment when I looked around the car, it seemed I was the only one with my eyes open at all. I struggled, not to sing along.
When the man was done, two stops later, he walked up and down the length of the car twice, slowly, hitting his hands against the metal polls. He did not ask for money and I wondered if we were supposed to offer, or if he would, in a minute, begin to prosyletize. He looked like he had been crying.
He put the electric sax back into his wheely napsack and went on to the next car. A few seconds later, conversation errupted, the woman across from me got off at her stop, the guy next to me went back to his Koran, and I wondered how quick the memory of the thing was going to slip away rom eveyone who had been there, and how much of a fluke it was, or if it would happen, in turn, to each car as the man made his rounds.
Most of the time, most of us spend our lives in the prsence of people with no idea how much power they have. Sometimes though, we merely spend it in the presence of folk with no idea what to do with it.
Or perhaps he did know.
And we simply didn't.
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