A jazz club in Oakland. It's five years ago plus a little more, and I'm at a little table in the back, transported. I've wandered off into corridors and alleys that I've been away from for far too long now, pen in hand as I search for the secret password. The music is something like pinballs knocking on and off the insides of me. Things light up. Sirens signal something coming to life, a win. I think of white, a white heron, and of red, blood red.

Maybe it seems off topic, that jazz club years behind me now. But this morning I realized that I'm there again, in that dusky club, where nothing is scripted out. Travel is jazz. And I'm made of both, always aching for some new riff to help me come alive.

Case in point: this Chinese man. What if I went my whole life without seeing something like that? I bless the luck that brought me here, the other side of the world and drenched in song.