An Old, Worn CD Player

Neither of them knew what they were getting into. She was a young white woman with plain modest clothing and pants worn a bit too high. Her hair is long, frizzy and dirty brown. She was heading to her job as an assistant for Bank of America. Patricia Newhouse was traveling from her apartment in Queens to the Manhattan headquarters located on the lower west side. She had missed the number 4 train which would have take her straight to her building on Broadway between Barday and Liberty. Instead she has to take the 5 train which brought her one block from where she would have rather been.

He was a large heavy built, older black man. He wore a cream colored hat with a dark navy blue windbreaker. He carried a newspaper that he picked up on the way from his house, a bag containing a new set of headphones and a couple of jazz cd’s from the local electronics store, and an old wooden cane to support his ailing knee. He was on his way to the grocery store he ran on Canal Street in China Town. He too was running late, and had to take the 5 train instead of the 6. George Franklin got on the subway from his small cramped apartment in Brooklyn, which he shared with his only daughter and 6 year old granddaughter.

He got on the train and took a seat beside an average sized, young, Caucasian woman with long frizzy dirty brown hair. She dressed modestly and carried a large black bag. She wore large black headphones attached to an old, worn CD player. He couldn’t help but overhear that she was listening to the same CD he had bought previously that morning. He wouldn’t expect a young, modern woman to be listening to Jazz.  Most of the young people he saw on the subway blasted their loud, heavy base, music on their tiny brightly colored ipods with their pristine miniscule white earbuds. This girl was different.

“You like Miles Davis?” He inquired, pointing at the new CD he bought.

“Yeah!” She said, slightly caught off guard by this mans kind curiosity. “You too?”

“Yeah….I used to play in a jazz band when I was younger, o’course. But we used too git all our inspiration an such from guys like Miles Davis, an Duke Ellington. We was pretty damn good if you ask me.”

Patricia, a former musician herself, found that she was strangely intrigues by this mans tale. They continued to talk. They were both so involved that they both missed their stops and did not realize what had happened until the train stopped and turned back around in the direction it had come from.

When it came time for them to part, they exchanged phone numbers. Little did they know, this seemingly insignificant meeting would lead to changes in their lives that they never would have expected…