I’m learning that it’s the tiniest choices that change the course of history, that weave threads of lives together or apart. It’s amazing that we almost never see them coming, or at least I don’t.

I just didn’t feel like watching The Blues Brothers, that was all. It’s not a movie I love and so when we finished dinner at Blind Lemon’s, said goodnight to Carlos, and wandered out into the mayan black I asked my friend Chris if he’d like to go check out the music at Paco instead. I kissed my family goodnight and the wandered through the serpentine paths with my friend on the shores of our Lago toward Sherbrooke Street, in Montreal, Canada, without any suspicion whatsoever that I was headed anywhere but to hear some hippie play at Frank’s.

Duane is anything but a hippie, even if he does have dreadlocks.

The kids have been excited to see him for weeks; we all have. The anticipation of his arrival on Wolfe Island to play a concert for our friends was almost more than the children could stand. Hannah wondered aloud whether or not Duane existed outside of Central America. I smiled at that, as I wonder the same thing about lots of people in the various corners of our world. Would he still be Duane in Canada, speaking English and playing in our yard instead of surrounded by whirling hippie girls and a light haze of various smokes?

It turns out, he is.

We go a lot of places and I write a lot of stories. People read them and travel with us through words and pictures. I love that. Often folks will “wish” that they could be with us in some capacity, and exist for a moment in the story, we wish they could too.

Last night some of us got our wishes as we sat on lawn chairs, milk crates and woven mats, lovingly imported from Guatemala by my mother years ago, listening to our buddy Duane sing and play his guitar in the side lawn of my parent’s house. So many friends were there: The Newcombs & Yyvonne Leach, who always reminds me that she’s read every single story I’ve written over the past three years. My friend Erin Merry, who’s name describes her perfectly & who I’ve known since we were about five. Jade & Jen and their families, staples of my high school existence. Many of my parents friends too filled out the crowd and bobbed their heads along with Duane’s signature bossa-nova-esque style. With amazingly generous hearts, they’d all come to support Duane’s art school in Honduras, The Genesis Project.

I couldn’t help but smile as I watched my kids play badminton and croquet with the Canadian kids with the same enthusiasm they’d had playing with Imelda’s Mayan kids all winter. That familiar ache returned to the center of my chest: the one that reminds me that there is no world in which I entirely fit any more and the convergence of these two worlds became particularly poignant and sweet.

This is the very best of our nomadic life: the people we meet who steal a tiny piece of our hearts and the great joy found in bringing a few of the pieces together on the same island from time to time.

We sat this evening in a funky second story cafe on Sherbrooke Street in Montreal, hanging out for Duane’s first gig and meeting his friend Annie. The walls were painted in funky colours with a zen like pattern stenciled on the ceiling. We ordered (in abysmal French after so much time south in the past two years) and for just a second we felt almost at home, complete with dreadlocked hippies in one corner of the cafe, drumming on their table.

My mind wandered with the melody as Tony’s sock, in tones of caramel and chocolate grew along with the crowd. Every so often, for just a second, life is absolutely perfect and I’m wowed by the immense blessing of the gift of the freedom we have to live it our way. My kids leaned out the cafe window to watch the arrest being made in front of the metro station. Annie quietly taped most of Duane’s performance with the affection of a friend who’s gone too long between visits. Our buddy sang and spoke in three languages while I tucked myself under Tony’s arm, knit, and burned every precious second into my memory for colder, darker days in the distance.

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