It's a Small Carousel

I’m in New York City, the baggage claim at JFK, waiting for the carousel to start moving so that I can navigate the bag-retrieval challenge. Rarely do I check my bag through, being jaded enough not to trust that it will arrive when I do, and, if it doesn’t, that I’ll weather the experience with grace. But since I’m traveling with a bag-checking friend, I have entrusted my small lime-green case to the belly of the plane.

Before my friend joins me, I am the only passenger standing by the silent belt. It’s quieter here than I would have expected. Soon I begin to hear a conversation behind me.

“They say he’ll be able to dance tonight.”

“I hope so.”

“Me, too.”

I catch a few more words, amidst the gaps created by the sea of other voices beginning to gather for their bags: senior performance . . . Juilliard . . . it’s been months . . . I can’t wait . . .

I have a friend who went to Juilliard. I met him in a dance class in Orono. At the time, I had a grant-dependent job at the university that would last no more than a year, and a perk of the employment was a free class. Friends were encouraging me to take something that would improve my employability in the future.

I took a dance class. At 8 a.m. All 18- and 19-year-olds—and me. I was in heaven. Three mornings a week, I joined a conglomeration of bodies, some of whom had clearly never pliéd in life. Others, I could tell, were here because it was one more opportunity to satisfy their dance jones, and get credit, too. And then there was Joe. He had left Juilliard and would return the next year. “Dancer Boy”—that’s what I always silently called him—was brilliant, delightful, spirited, handsome, focused, generous, and oh so talented.

I turn to the man and the woman who are clearly the parents of the new Juilliard dancer and tell them I met a Juilliard dancer back in Bangor a few years ago and that he now dances professionally all over the globe.
How funny, it strikes me, that it’s not the dancer they’re interested in as I hear them both say almost in tandem, “Bangor?”

Their Riley, a Glenburn boy, studied dance around the corner from where I now live, was awarded a Princess Grace Award for dance, and will perform with a company, I think they said, in Switzerland after graduation. And here we are, strangers, crossing paths in a New York City airport.

I am struck yet once again at how small the world really is. I have a million small-world stories, as I’m sure we all do—the agent in a rental car place in a distant state who asks whether my children went to Katahdin High School; the clerk in a little market on the West Coast who recognizes my name because her cousin sent her a magazine with an article I wrote; a recent post office encounter in which a woman says she saw me at a concert in New Hampshire last week.

By the time I turn to the conveyor belt, hundreds of suitcases are circling Carousel 3, most of them black and large and difficult to maneuver from the moving belt. But, look, there it is—my small lime-green bag. Let the stories begin.