Tomorrow People
At 9-ish this morning, Friday, after the crazy and now historic Tornado-Hits-Brooklyn excitability of yesterday, I was wandering around my company's insanely spacious (but oddly devoid of things you crave to eat) cafeteria. Recently, the staff has ambushed the sound system -- in an inmates-running-the-asylum way, no disrespect -- regaling us tired corporate drones with a truly bizarre repetoire of unknown origin (radio? someone's cd or 8-track collection?) of tunes. While waiting for my usual crazy-healthy vegetable drink, I heard on the speakers (over the noise of the juicer and the sound of a couple businessmen babbling into their ridiculous Bluetooth ear-pieces) the faint reggae rhythms of a long-forgotten song.
Juggling my (possibly fake) Starbucks coffee and my noxious green drink and half a bagel with low-fat vegetable cream cheese (um, hello, what happened to the scallion?) I was mesmerized by the faint, honeyed Jamaican intonations of a song with familiar beat and words that, though intelligible, harkened piercingly back to my somewhat distant past.
It came to me on the down-escalator: Ziggy Marley's "Tomorrow People" -- a song I recall really enjoying (in a dance-around-the-room manner) way, way back when. From 1988, the year I graduated from college.
And I heard it just after I was contacted -- or, in today's online parlance pinged or... poked -- by dear friend P., from Paris (via facebook.com, go figure... I mean really). With whom I graduated the same year but sadly lost touch. With whom I had lived in that same year in a great flat in the East Village, struggling together through the end of film school, drinking cappucinos at Cafe Orlin and having deep conversation at some long-gone joint just south of Cooper Union.
Small synchronicities, that's what it's all about. Coincidence? Of course. I don't believe in 99% of perceived connections but believe they are what life is really all about-- the frisson of imagining that they do mean something. The ephemeral stuff of literature and film and dreams.
And I heard it just after I was contacted -- or, in today's online parlance pinged or... poked -- by dear friend P., from Paris (via facebook.com, go figure... I mean really). With whom I graduated the same year but sadly lost touch. With whom I had lived in that same year in a great flat in the East Village, struggling together through the end of film school, drinking cappucinos at Cafe Orlin and having deep conversation at some long-gone joint just south of Cooper Union.
Small synchronicities, that's what it's all about. Coincidence? Of course. I don't believe in 99% of perceived connections but believe they are what life is really all about-- the frisson of imagining that they do mean something. The ephemeral stuff of literature and film and dreams.
No moral to this non-story. I come from a certifiably Ludditic (is that a word?) family and can now, again, smile at my own choice to embrace technology in the dream that it has at least a modicum of power to connect people with their past. And a present they might not have known.
You know I am a Very Busy Woman and it's not in my nature to wax nostalgic but this kind of thing is happening more often and it just makes me so damn happy.
