Tugging at your harp strings

A long time ago, back in the era when you could go places and do things, I used to spend Sunday mornings at my local place of worship.

The flea market.

Okay, it wasn’t a place of worship in the conventional sense, but there was always the potential that I might achieve transcendence in the discovery of cheap records for my music collection.

I usually had a good idea of what I wanted and limited myself to purchasing only those items I felt certain about.

But one day, I was going through a box of albums and came upon an antiquated album of Xmas music that intrigued me.

In part because it replicated musical boxes, which screams nostalgia.

But it also had a very whimsical looking snowman on the cover.

I had to have it.

‘How much for this album?’ I asked.

‘It’s $5 for the whole box,’ the vendor replied.

‘You won’t sell me the one album?’

‘Nope. Five for the whole box.’

I decided I didn’t want a whole box of LPs just to get that one Xmas album, so I walked off to look at other tables and then went to a nearby bookstore that also sold cheap LPs.

But I could not stop thinking about that box.

Something kept telling me that if I didn’t go back for it, I’d regret it.

So I did something unprecedented for me.

I went back to the flea market, paid the admission again, found the vendor, bought the box, and hailed a cab to get it home.

The contents were mainly Reader’s Digest record sets, easy listening artists I had no interest in, and other curios that didn’t register with me.

One of them was Dorothy’s Harp, an album by Dorothy Ashby.

Truth be told, it didn’t look promising.

An album of harp renditions of hits such as By the Time I Get to Phoenix, The Windmills of Your Mind, and Fool on the Hill?

It just seemed to reinforce the folly of buying the box.

And yet, I thought I should try it out

Maybe it would be good for a chuckle.

But I didn’t laugh.

Because within seconds, I realized that Dorothy Ashby was a prodigiously talented and innovative musician and that this album was a wonderful collection of groovy jazz recordings that incorporated elements of funk, R&B, and world music.

And that led to two other realizations that might have some application in your life.

One is that the worst possibly judgments we make are based on appearances.

I made that mistake with Ashby’s relatively nondescript album art and song selection.

As it turned out, others made the same mistake with Ashby when she started playing jazz harp.

After all, Ashby was not only a Black woman carving out a space for herself in a genre dominated by men but also she was doing so with an instrument that very few associated with or wanted to hear in a jazz context.

It took time for people to warm to the idea of a jazz harpist, but over the years Ashby’s late 60s/early 70s albums have become highly collectible and frequent sources for samples, and she became an in-demand session musician for artists like Stevie Wonder.

The other realization I made is that occasionally the real joys we find in life come from unexpected sources.

We often think we know what we want, and we make that our focus or main pursuit in life.

But that focus can become so narrow that we don’t see that there are other adventures, other possibilities, other things we can do, be, or experience that could be just as, if not more, rewarding as what we think we want.

As a result, we miss out on discovering something new about ourselves or the world around us because we never think to look around, pivot, or say yes to something different.

In my case, it was a album, but it could just as easily have been a job opportunity or a client.

Ultimately, when we are open to new things and new ways of being, our lives are enriched.

It means taking a chance now and then, but nothing is promised anyway.

And in a year like this, when everything is uncertain and no one has any easy answers, I think it is vital to explore new paths, whether you think big like Ashby did by making jazz harp a thing or just take a chance on one of her albums like I did.

Suffice to say that, since then, whenever a seller at a record show, yard sale or flea market asks me ‘what are you looking for?’ my answer has been ‘I don’t know, and won’t know until I find it.’

And even then, I still don’t know until I listen.

Has it ever happened to you that you found something you love by happenstance? Did a judgment you made based on appearances ever prove to be wrong or unfounded? I'd love to know what wonderful things came your way just by being open.