Transcription
Around the Cosmic Campfire by Tony Wright
Chapter 17: Some Really Short Shorts
Story Five: Jimmy Messina
For some time, I ran a writer’s night outside of Nashville. It was a successful event every single week for years. All kinds of music dignitaries would come, sometime sitting in, sometimes nestling in with a local country audience. It rivaled the famous Bluebird Cafe writer’s night in Nashville, and we who spent our time and energies offering it were quite proud of it.
One year, through the writer’s night and various people, I made the acquaintance of a dear man, Jim Messina. It had been years since he was with Kenny Loggins, and he was doing his own musical thing and traveling around the United States, performing and still writing and recording. I met him in one time frame when he was recording at Michael McDonald’s studio in my small community of Leipers Fork, Tennessee. He did not meet me, however, through Michael, but through my writer’s night. We started to hang out there, and he would fly back to my area, and he would come to my woodlands retreat for my professional healing body work. We’d dine, spend time in the woods, and look at the stars while having long conversations. I found him to be a wonderful person that I was happy to get to know.
In time, we slid away from each other, and we both went to our other ventures. Years later, my son married and had a child, and as I got to know his new bride, who was only nine years younger than myself, we were talking one day. She had also been a massage therapist, but on the West Coast and not in Nashville. She was talking at one point about Jimmy. As we explored a bit deeper who Jimmy was, I found that my new daughter-in-law was hanging out with Jim Messina in some other part of the country at virtually the same time that I had been. We seemed to nail it that it was the same year.
Out of all the people in the world, all the places Jim would travel, and through all of those people, how did he meet us both? And of all the people my son could meet and eventually marry, what is the likelihood that it would come to someone who had hung out with the same man that I did in the same area of time? I find this fascinating, at least. How do these synchronicities occur? Are we tuning into a God station and finding people important to us who have tuned in as well?
In any regard, he was a delightful person, and I am enriched by him for sure. I feel privileged to have known him, and I know she concurs. Life, I mean, really, what a funny transaction.