It's a twisting road we travel, and when I finally made it to Santa Fe after years of planning, my wife and I soon decided to go our separate ways.  I found myself exploring the area on my own, and one Saturday night I was intrigued by the name of a band booked at the Mine Shaft Tavern in Madrid, the next town south of Cerillos.  When I arrived, I discovered that the band, 'Peter Amahl and the Soul Coal Revue', had cancelled the performance due to a cold Pete was laboring under, but then at the last minute had decided that the show would go on.  As a result, the turnout for this talented group of studio musicians was scant, for the word of the cancellation had spread too quickly through the local grapevine.  It was to my benefit, as by the end of the night, I had come to know most of the small group of locals as well as the band by first name. 

At one point in the evening I turned to Nancy, a cook from another eatery in Santa Fe, and asked if she knew a guy by the name of Cornelius Joseph McFadden.  Nancy paused, assessing me with her eyes, and then announced to the room:  "Hey you guys, this guy knew Mackie!".  Glasses were raised as she pointed to a framed photo behind the bar from which Neal's visage was gazing back at me.  She told me that he had passed away a few months before.  I was surprised that the passing of someone I had met only briefly would have such an impact and was saddened to know that the guy who had shone such a powerful light and life that one warm afternoon just a few years ago would not do so again.  As the evening faded, I bid farewell to the others and returned home with a heightened sense of the tenuous nature of our lives.

A year and a few months passed before my marriage was well and truly dissolved, and I left on a kayaking trip around the US that was conceived as a means to rehabilitate myself following an emotionally stressful period.  Within a month I found myself on the West coast, at yet another country bar in the Mendocino area.  Some locals I had met a couple of days before had told me that the band scheduled to appear that evening was cool, so I arrived at dusk, pausing on the establishment's veranda to burn a cigarette before entering.  I was telling a dude in the circle of smokers that I hailed from New Mexico as another man with a greying beard and long blond hair exited the bar, sat beside me, and began to roll a cigarette of his own.  When the conversation flagged, this new bloke asked what part of New Mexico I was from, to which I replied, "Santa Fe".  He said he had a place in Cerrillos, but had been living here on the Pacific coast for the past few years.  Estimating my companion's age to be about that of Neal's, I asked if he knew Neal McFadden.  Time seemed to stall, as the stranger paused, a look of consternation crossing his face as he gathered his thoughts, and then slowly and earnestly replied, "He was my best friend". 

That was about twelve years ago.  I spent that night with the stranger, Mick, and his wife/friend/lover Sylvia at their cottage in Albion.   I have spent many more pleasant evenings with them since they returned to New Mexico a couple of years later.  Mackie's best friend, Mick, and his wife Sylvia, are now my friends too, and while I don't see them as often as I would like, when I do, it is always a graceful experience, as I believe it to be for them as well.

It's interesting to consider how such chance connections are made.  I'm tempted to assign more significance to it than it being a simple matter of chance and personalities recognizing others with whom they are simpatico, though there is that too.  After all, I liked Neal, and Mick liked Neal, so it seems logical that Mick and I had a better than average chance of becoming friends.  All that may have been required was an incredibly complex confluence of events to transpire which would bring us together.    What incredible panoply of happenstance brought me to that particular inn, that particular night in Mendocino, when I stopped for a smoke just as my friend-to-be decided to have one of his own?

I have often met people who have presented timely clues that inform my decisions as I make my way in life.  It's a happy occasion when we recognize and connect with kindred and benevolent spirits.  Then again, there are some who manage to be too often in the wrong places at the wrong times.   Lou Reed described something of that in his song 'Street Hassle' when he wrote and sang, "You know... It's called 'bad luck'".   Yet luck strings together the events of all our lives in both joyful and tragic vignettes and I believe that one's chances can be changed for the better.

An astrologer friend of mine might say that positive connections occur at least partially as a function of being "in phase" with one's true nature.  To her thinking, it is these times when we're most in tune with whoever it is we truly are, and also when we leave ourselves more open to others, and they to us.  Certainly those moments may be the times when we appear most attractive to others and in so being, make a more lasting impression on those we meet.  Similarly at such times we may be more focused, as Ram Das would say, on  "being here now", and consequently assimilating more from the people and activities we are engaged in than might occur otherwise.  In these moments perhaps we more fully reveal the bodhisattva behind the cantankerous/scowling/unhappy/fearful beings we to often portray when we're in conflict with our innermost and truest selves.   By affirming our true self with all our foibles, perhaps we make ourselves more beneficially available to others who may be in need of an unadulterated dose of our own peculiar flavor of being, and vice versa.  I've noticed that when I'm more fully engaged in the present, truth and life indeed, seem stranger than fiction, and I'll take all of that flavor, that I can get, thank you.  Whatever the case, I do count my blessings.

I still ponder the statistical odds of those random conversations on the porches of two separate bars, in two different states, across a divide of years, that would bring together Cornelius Joseph McFadden, his friend Mick, and myself, resulting with Mick, Sylvia, and I in turn becoming friends.  These mysteries that are happily not quite anomalies, encourage me as I traverse the landscape of this, my particular journey.  Such happenstance gives me the hope, or perhaps delusion that my own small derivation of the music of the spheres which I call my life, contains some semblance of harmony and grace.  If nothing else, I now have a story to tell and you have just read it.  Forgive my ramblings and conjecture as I've spun this tale, it is mostly the recounting of the people and events which are remarkable to me and are that which I wish to convey.

Consider that you will never know whether the stranger around the next curve in your life, may or may not be the bogeyman as advertised, waiting to wreak havoc this Halloween night. Perhaps s/he is merely a friend in need of an introduction.  Too much of our media portrays the unknown in terms of the former while the humanity engendered by remaining open to connection suffers accordingly.  In the end I can only tip my hat, and raise a glass to those who have touched the lives of others, and more especially strangers, with kindness, whether in good words, thoughts, gestures, deeds, or the odd smile.  I salute you who have managed to celebrate yourselves, master fear, and to sing the body electric.  I bow to you.  Especially the canines.  Don't let it go to your heads, you dogs.