The Games We Play with Strangers...Scrabble with Sarah and Roberto

Talking to Strangers (About Music)

I met Roberto at Cafe Martin in Park Slope. He was a mathematician/philosopher working there between gigs. A song had come on and I asked a question about it, and he said how popular it was with the French kids. He said it with a bit of a scoff. He sounded French but...”where are you from?” I asked before I guessed.

“I’m Italian,” he said. He grew up in Monaco though. Maybe I learned that then, or later, that relationship between his Italian roots and growing up in France. It read on his face, though, his pondering of things, his strong opinions, and I liked him immediately. We became friends. I had just started my nonprofit, InspireCorps, and he helped me in a variety of ways, including walking and talking with my dog, Ginger (seriously, they had a language), and tutoring my boys in math. He was a good friend in general, with his truthful straight-up philosophy of life. When he met the lovely always-smiling Sarah, a great poet and writer, in a philosophy class at the New School, it was a perfect match. The way two people can light up talking about Kierkegaard...amazing. They became regulars at our dinner table, often dog-sitting when we went away. We would see their incredibly high Scrabble scores on scraps of paper when we got home, and be impressed. It wasn’t until now that we played with them. I recorded a bit of that game, at the end. It is funny what we learn about others and ourselves when we play games, when we see them win or lose, when we win or lose ourselves, how we handle it. Listen in.