Every so often a bunch of stuff converges and feels like divine inspiration. Over the last week, three different events have come together synergistically for me. Divine? Maybe not. But inspiration – definitely!

The first was seeing the movie Gone Baby Gone. It was filmed in my old neighborhood. Dorchester, pronounced Dahchestah if you live there. I still feel a mixture of shame and pride when I say that’s where I’m from. Those characters weren’t stereotypes. They were dead on. Those were my neighbors growing up. And yet, I never really inhaled. I never got the accent or the attitude. But I saw enough to have it influence my perception of the world.

The second event is ongoing. I’m reading Daniel Levitin’s “This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.” I’m not even a third of the way through, and already I understand much more about the physiology of music than I ever have. How it’s inherently part of our brain. How our reaction to music isn’t just cultural; it’s physical. When he explains how even barn owls’ bodies can respond to and play a Strauss waltz, it sent shivers down my spine.

The third event was watching the video Mike Troiano posted to this very blog (http://blog.matchmine.com/2007/11/21/just-a-great-video/) . Watching it knitted events one and two together in a way that is hard to explain. But I’ll try.

You see, I was on that train. No, not that specific one. Another train, actually a trolley, many years ago. It was the Saturday midnight trolley from Ashmont Station to Mattapan Square. Full of Dahchestah kids. Black kids. White kids. Brown kids. At the height of busing. Somebody had a boom box. (Yeah, I’m dating myself… so what?) The song “Boogie Wonderland” came on.

Until then everyone was sitting quietly. But then, wham!, every %#^@& kid on that trolley jumped out of their seat. We were singing and dancing, rocking that trolley for all it was worth. It was spontaneous and glorious. No race. No hate. No redlining. No barriers. Just a mess of kids whooping it up to a song we all liked.

It wasn’t our skin dancing and singing. It wasn’t our clothes. It wasn’t our culture. It was our inner selves. We were like the owls in Levitin’s book, responding deeply, to our very core, to our very bones. And for 4:51, we were one.

Now, we here at matchmine might not be able to get media for the inner you in quite that dramatic a fashion. But, you know, we’re going to give it one hell of a try.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 10:32 am and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.