I’ve been reading Kenzaburo Oe’s “A Healing Family” — a wonderful collection of essays on topics related to Oe’s son Hikari, who was born with a severe brain defect, and who became an accomplished pianist and composer. An excerpt:

Sitting nearby with a book, listening to his piano lessons, I can feel the best, most human things in his character finding lively and fluent expression; and when I hear the works he has produced performed by Mrs. Tamura and other musicians who have been generous in their support, I feel in awe of the richness of his inner life. Yet this is a life that, were it not for music, would have remained hidden, would have been utterly unknown to me, to my wife, and Hikari’s younger brother and sister. I am not someone who believes in any faith, but I find it hard to deny that there is something… something akin perhaps to “grace” in this music; indeed, listening to Hikari’s music, being exposed to the world beyond our everyday experience in which it seems to participate, makes me appreciate in it the full meaning of the word; not only “gracefulness” and “virtue” but “a prayer of thanks.”

I have not faced any of the challenges that Hikari has, and yet much of what Oe is describing feels very familiar to me. I’ve often felt that my own “inner life” is expressed with greater precision and dimension when I am making music than it ever could be through words, physical gestures, or any other form of communication of which I am aware. And I too find that music brings me closest to that concept of “grace,” which Oe describes so beautifully.

Oe hears in his son’s music a “prayer of thanks.” I sense this quality in much of the music I play, and as I play it, one of the things I find myself giving thanks to is music itself, for the inexpressible role it has played in my life.

Sunday, I played my last concert of a month-long European tour. A month is longer than I’m used to being away from home at a stretch, and I’ll admit that by the end of it, despite having been in many wonderful places, I was very ready to go home.

The concert was in beautiful Schwetzingen, and the circumstances were close to ideal: the venue was aesthetically beautiful and acoustically even better, the piano was excellent, and the audience was as good as one could ask for — attentive, appreciative, obviously musical. As I finished the concert, I thought to myself that it was the best possible way to cap the month. And then the trouble started.

I was flying home through London, and Schwetzingen is more than an hour from the Frankfurt airport by car. I didn’t have much extra time to get to Frankfurt, my connection in London was fairly tight, and there was no later flight as a back-up -  in short, plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong.

Which is precisely what happened — immediately. I went to the appointed place to meet the driver who would be taking me to the airport, and he was not there. (Probably no one’s fault - just a wires-crossed moment…) Schwetzingen on a Sunday afternoon is not the sort of place where one calls a taxi on the spur of the moment, and I didn’t have any phone numbers in Germany that were of much use at that moment, and so I saw the whole house of cards that was the day’s trip falling down.

A few minutes and a few phone calls later, I had run completely out of ideas. It was at this point that a man approached me.

“You need to go to the airport, yes?”

Affirmative.

“And you’re in trouble, aren’t you?”

Again, affirmative.

“OK, I have a car, I’ll take you.”

When I recovered my power of speech, I happily accepted. It turned out that he had been at the concert with a friend. They had planned to have lunch in town following the concert, but when they overheard me, they decided to offer, as they were going to Frankfurt later in the afternoon anyway. So what looked to be turning into a nightmare say ended up being a pleasure - an afternoon drive with two extremely friendly, interesting people. And to top it all off, an on-time arrival at JFK hours later.

I’ve written before about the frustrations of travel, due to weather, human error, mechanical problems - the works. But in my experience, travel today is frequently unpleasant because of the behavior of people - needlessly unfriendly, unhelpful, inflexible.  At the end of a month which had been exhausting in every possible way, this small and completely unselfish act of kindness made me feel just slightly better about not only the traveling lifestyle, but about the world we live in.