The Buzz of Neon

Originally written Wednesday, 11/16/05

So, was that a cliffhanger, or what?

OK, well, maybe not an edge-of-your-seat cliffhanger, but at least perhaps an oh, how intriguing type thing.

Well, hope I’m not disappointing anyone, but I don’t feel like writing about that today. It’s something of an exaggeration anyway. I’m an educator, through and through. It is my livelihood, quite literally. And some of the skills I teach can lead to the living forever thing. But attaining that is no guarantee. And it comes to students only when they become educators themselves.

What I do feel like talking about is how friggin’ cold it was today. It’s not that the temperature was all that low—around 40 most of the day, I’d say—but it came on so suddenly that most of us weren’t expecting it. There were a few flakes of snow in the air, the first of the season. I ran into Trudy coming out of class this evening, and she said that even the temperature of her room felt like it had dropped twenty degrees overnight. It may have something to do with the construction being done a building over. Holes in the floors, the power turning on and off at unexpected times… and the furnace seems to need some repair work. She’s going to be wandering the tunnels a bit in the next few days to see if she can find a better place to wipe her feet.

I met Trudy through Patrick, and Patrick I met several hundred miles away, right before we both moved to this area. I was visiting friends in New Jersey, and as luck would have it, Melissa Ferrick was playing in New York that week. I hadn’t seen her in years, and I was really looking forward to it. I found out too last-minute to reserve a ticket, so I started driving into New York early to make sure I had enough time to get to the box office. To make a long story short, a series of delays occurred—traffic, parking, angry panhandlers, a mistake in the address I had written down—that caused me no end of stress from the time I left my friends’ house to the time I arrived at the venue. Worn out from the longest fifteen-mile trip I’d ever taken, I paused in front of the music hall for a minute and gazed at it as if it were the Wailing Wall and I a desperate penitent.

That pause turned out to be the last of the many conspicuous turns of fate that caused me to meet Patrick. After regaining myself, I hopped on line. The minute I got to the front, the box office chick said the music fan’s four most frustrating words: “We just sold out.” She then said that there were a number of reserved tickets that would become available if they weren’t claimed, but that there would be no waiting list and I could wait at the bar if I liked. I tried begging—which is completely unlike me, but I had gone through hell to get to that place, and I’d be damned if I were going to give up—but she pawned me off on her supervisor. I begged her supervisor, and he told me the same thing: wait in the bar. So I did.

As Patrick and I ordered drinks side by side, we exchanged some sort of forgettable small talk, which led into mutual frustration that the show sold out, which became a full-fledged conversation. Eventually, we each discovered the other had come to the concert alone, which is something not everyone would do, and more intriguingly we learned we were both going to be moving to the same Midwestern college town, to the same Midwestern college, within weeks of each other.

At about that moment, the stoic supervisor from half an hour earlier tapped my shoulder and said he could sell me a ticket. (It was a strategy I’ve used in many, many other contexts—give the other person much hope and little expectation, and their gratitude when you come through for them will be boundless. Of course, knowing the premeditation behind his actions didn’t make me love him any less for it!) I quickly said goodbye to Patrick and told him I’d look out for him in the Midwest if he couldn’t get in, and followed my karmic conveyor inside.

A few minutes later, Patrick was at my side again: the very kind man who had already gone out of his way to discreetly smuggle me past the other people waiting had apparently noticed us talking and done the same for Patrick. I do dearly hope that young man was rewarded with his very own raise, or blowjob, or VIP access to something or other, because he was truly something.

So to sum up, the universe wasn’t playing with subtle hints that night; it was screaming in neon. The kind of neon that buzzes outside your window and keeps you up all night. I’m not one to shun coincidence on principle. A remarkable series of coincidences is another matter, though. I suspected Patrick was meant to be my student, and I’m glad to say I haven’t been disappointed.