It's not every day

So I met this really interesting person the other day.

I was helping my work-friend, Jenny, who is a recruiter (employment kind, not army kind). She asked me to do a first interview with a candidate for employment, because his application showed he was from India and she's not particularly culturally-diverse-comfortable, so wanted me to meet with him first. She thinks I'm more patient with accents.

This man wasn't applying for any position in particular - he knows he has a language barrier, so he's looking for any job that would have him. So I asked him the most open-ended job related question I know: what kind of work do you really like to do? In a zillion years I would never had been prepared for the answer.

This kind gentleman asked me how much time I had to meet with him. When I invited him to take as long as he liked, he began to explain to me his lifelong goal - he wants to create a worldwide organization to, as he put it, "spread humanism all around the world." He drew the organizational chart for me -explaining the three types of help (physical help, financial help and knowledge help), and how he intended to get all this to happen. He then explained that he comes from a family that thinks his goal means he is lazy and doesn't want to do real work, so he'd like to work for our housekeeping department, please.

As we ended our meeting, he thanked me graciously for listening to him and told me that, whether we offered him employment or not, I should feel welcome to stay in touch with him, in case I ever needed help from him.

I'm glad Jenny asked me to cover this one for her. She might have thought he was nuts. It's possible that he is a little... but he's going to be great for our organization. He starts Monday.

Serendipity

So you know how the planets line up sometimes and point us to something wonderful? Here's todays wonderful thing (but there's a bunch of stuff leading up to it - bear with me):

A dozen years ago, we met Fred because of NRBQ and he introduced us to The Chandler Travis Philharmonic and gave us our first recording of the Incredible Casuals at the Wellfleet Beachcomber. Ok, so fast forward a bunch of years to last summer, when we saw signs around Wellfleet about praying for Caleb Potter and I searched the internet to try to find out what that was about and discovered Susan's blog and coincidentally, Susan is a friend of Fred's. Still with me? So Susan also blogs for the beachcomber and recently posted about this bridge in Wellfleet that was going to be torn down and rebuilt.

So, remember when I told you about buying this really cool condo (except that it's in a gated community and I have a hang up about that). Anyway, when we met the seller at the closing in May (she was really super nice) and she told us a bit about our neighbors and mentioned Mike who lives downstairs. When we were moving in, Mike offered to help us carry stuff and mentioned this neat thrift shop in Orleans that has furniture and said we might find bargains there. Still hanging in? O.k. so we're still furnishing and decorating our new place and today, I went into that thrift shop on a whim and found this beautiful photo, all wrapped and matted, of the very same Uncle Tim's bridge in Wellfleet, taken by the "Wellfleetian" fisherman and photographer Walter Baron. Clearly, I was meant to have this picture, especially because I had no reason to even know what Uncle Tim's bridge is if it hadn't been for these wonderful people I've been introduced to, plus it had been marked down twice and was truly a bargain. Here's the icing on the whole thing - Jeff mentioned (a couple of times this week) that it would be nice if we had a wine rack, preferably a black wrought iron one (there's a lot of wrought iron in the condo) and they also had one of those for ten bucks.

All of this leads me to feel very blessed - not just by the bargain, but all it represents. It came to us by way of a lot of good fortune, wonderful people, exceptional musicians who bring us joy, and a little help from the planets. I will treasure it all and, I hope, never take it for granted.