So I walk to the subway in the cold, wrapped in layers of comforting, comfortable warmth, and as I head down the stairs to the platform, over the pop in my headphones hear the sound of an acoustic guitar. It takes me a second to find the source, but hidden at first by the pillars, a well-dressed man in a newsboy cap is tuning and played his guitar.
I move closer but he doesn’t seem to be busking, just playing for himself. He gets on the train and I edge onto the same car, sitting down in an empty spot across from him and turning off the music on my iPod. On the train, he continues to play, his battered wingtips and hat seeming like something out of time, and all I can think of is Woody Guthrie and what he’d think of the America we have now. This land is whose land, again?
It’s all of ours, mine and the skinny boy sitting next to me, in his late teens or maybe early twenties, who’s stopped reading on his Treo and is now watching the guitarist, long skinny white fingers wrapped around his bit of technology, his knit-hatted head resting against the bars. It’s the woman across from me, putting on her makeup as the train moves with steady hands. The older woman, who holds out a dollar to the guitarist and smiles when he refuses it—I can’t hear what he says but he smiles too.
At the next stop a girl sits next to him, opens a magazine, and he has no more room to play so he stands and starts again, facing me now, a day’s worth of stubble and nice cheekbones and a smile.
My stop comes, and as I walk past to get off I touch his arm and thank him. He might not know how much I needed that this morning, that tiny reminder that the world can be strange and beautiful when you least expect it.
