Today, after working a relatively normal shift, unlike my usual lengthy ones, I had some business to accomplish before the Sabbath. Last Sabbath, when I was starting to practice the music for an upcoming viola choir accompaniment at church, to my surprise and alarm I discovered that my stand was broken and unable to stand up because the threads had been broken in one of the nuts. So, the people who drove the stand from Colorado back to Oregon swung for a new one that we had looked at among the various options on Craigslist. There happened to be a particularly lovely stand marked for $20 and once the money arrived in the mail, I looked on the map to see where the location was and planned my trip there so that I could have a functioning stand for the next practice.

After leaving work, I called the phone number to find a fellow who sounded a bit strange. This is probably not an unusual issue on Craigslist, but I must admit I do not tend to buy things from there very often, so I was a bit concerned. Google Maps had shown that the stand was located at someone’s personal residence, and the map showed that it was in a lovely part of Northwest Portland not far from Thompson and Saltzman, a part of town I am not very familiar with at all. As someone who likes to use my interest in maps to help me be more familiar even with unfamiliar territory, though, I was able to find a route that led from work down West Union and then Thompson to the neighborhood, and I managed to find my way to the fellow’s house without any trouble, and with some beautiful views along the way. So far, at least, things had gone smoothly.

When I arrived at the house, I found myself greeted by a small and friendly and somewhat elderly looking Asian-American gentleman who then opened his garage door and showed me inside. What I saw were a lot of boxes filled with various items that the man was apparently selling as an entrepreneur [1]. I have seen at least a few other people do this in the area, and of course my viola Vivian was purchased from a similar operation, albeit one run out of the inside of the gentleman’s house as opposed to being in the garage. The man, if his English was a bit halting, was a pretty friendly person. He asked me if I wanted a microphone stand and I said I did not need one, he deducted $4 from the price of the stand as a result, and did not have change so he gave me a $1 bill and a $3 check that I will have to deposit at some point. He told me his son played the violin just as I played the viola, and had to open a large box with a boxcutter to take out the disassembled parts of my new music stand that I will have to learn fairly quickly how to put together.

As I carried the unwieldy parts to my car, I wondered about the sort of trust that is often required to be a musician of a freelancing sort. I drove into a strange neighborhood and bought the parts to a music stand from a gentleman whose garage was filled with large boxes and sharp objects used to rip them open. My dark and twisted imagination could not help but think of scenarios where that sort of thing could go tragically wrong. Yet the man too, an elderly man barely five feet tall, certainly trusted that the strange young man who rang his doorbell was similarly a man of peaceful intents, which in his case was a safe assumption to make. Not everyone, of course, would be likely to make that same assumption. Yet we two strangers, with a mutual love of orchestra music, were able to meet for a few minutes, engage in a mutually beneficial transaction, and then depart in peace, with no need to communicate again, but with perhaps a little bit of trust gained for being able to get along in a friendly way in a world full of strangers, a feat that while small is not something to be taken for granted in a world like our own.

[1] This is not that unusual when it comes to the world of Portland music, as I have written about before:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/09/12/viola-names/