Now, I know that this isn’t a polished story.  Well, actually it isn’t much of a story at all. Really, it is just a minute of interaction that I had with my new friend…

I had been out jogging as the sun was going down and the light was soupy and amber hued when this guy passed me on his bike.  All of the CDs wedged in his spokes seemed to be firing the fading light off in every direction.  It was like two giant kaleidoscopes spinning down the street.  It was mesmerizing.  He was a traveling light show.  I just had to talk to him.  I didn’t have my camera or an audio recorder, but I did have my iPhone with me.  I know that we can get caught up in all of the fancy tools that we can use to tell stories, but really, they shouldn’t get in the way of what they enable us to do.  And that is, quite simply, to talk to people. I caught up with him and asked him about his bike, recorded it in VoiceMemo, then snapped a photo as we talked for a few more minutes “off the record.”  Then as we turned to go our separate ways, Al said to me, (of course I had already stopped the recording!) “You know, just cause something does a job, that don’t mean it can’t be beautiful, too.”

The entire interaction was no more than five minutes, but it made my day.

I was reminded of what I so often forget: there are interesting people, doing interesting things, all around us, every day…if we would only stop and talk to each other…

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