We’re just back from a long weekend in Chicago that we mostly spent going to museums. But we had a few interesting and pleasant encounters with fellow travelers as well. Here’s one.

We stay at the Essex on Michigan Avenue since we discovered it a few years ago when we had waited too long to get into the Hilton across the street for the annual meeting of the National Communication Association. It’s a nice simple hotel, friendly to commercial travelers and vacationers alike. One pays a bit of a premium for its location on the south loop, but not as much as one pays for grander digs at the Hilton or the Blackstone.

On the afternoon of our arrival we took a walk along the edge of Grant Park and as we returned to the hotel fell in with an extended family group who seemed to be waiting for the hotel shuttle. At their center was a cluster of children of various ages, including a small boy who had attracted the attention of one of the women in the group. They seemed to be talking about the fact that the boy played the fiddle.

I would have guessed his age at about nine, old enough to speak up for himself but young enough still that he hadn’t yet passed that age when little boys sometimes turn into hellions. His aunt, as I guessed her to be, was saying to him that he could play his fiddle on the street in front of the hotel and make himself some money whilst they were there. His reply to her was that he might do it and then spend all the money he made buying video games.

We chuckled at the exchange, nodded to the grownups in the group as we walked by, and didn’t think about it again until the next morning. We had eaten breakfast in the little Brasserie that opens off the hotel lobby and were settling down to wait for another shuttle to take us to the Art Institute when we spied the small boy sitting in a chair just outside the hotel entrance playing a three quarter size cello with his instrument case open in front of him.

I walked outside to listen, and instead of the squawing I expected heard the surpassingly beautiful strains of a portion of of one of the Bach unaccompanied cello suites. I stood close by and listened to the boy’s playing for a bit then took some bills out of my pocket and put them in his instrument case, noticing as I did that he had already collected quite a reasonable fee. He thanked me politely without breaking his stride, and then I noticed two adults sitting on a concrete tree surround not far away and walked over to them.

“Is he your son?” I asked. The mother beamed and said he was. She then told me that he was eight years old and had been studying the cello since he was four. I speculated that with that beginning he might very well become a professional musician. The mother demurred a bit, saying that careers in classical music are hard. I mentioned young friends of mine who play in symphony orchestras by way of saying that such careers are still possible. Both parents smiled in a way that said to me how proud they were of this little boy, bravely playing his “fiddle” on the street and planning to spend all the money he made on video games.

As we talked on, they allowed as how the adventure had been his idea and that they had been against it at first but had given in because he had seemed very enthusiastic. What struck me, aside from his impeccable and beautiful playing, was the little boy’s confidence. And watching them all together I thought what a fine thing it was that there are still such little boys and such parents in the world, parents willing to nourish a child’s talent without regard for whether it might ever make him any money, parents who understood the preciousness of his gift.

For he had already learned a very important thing about who he was and what he was for. His music was already imbedded in his being; he tossed it off as though it were a slight thing, though of course his abillity to do so bespoke hours of toil and practice. I thought of Yeats’s wonderful poem:

. . . . . . . . ‘To be born woman is to know—
Although they do not talk of it at school—
That we must labour to be beautiful.’

I did not ask his name. It was blessing enough to have encountered him and his parents anonymously. The memory of his playing now resides in my mind among other archtypes that speak of the love of life and find me still rejoicing in the worth of the world.