I passed by this little character one Saturday morning while touring Leipzig, home to one of Europe's oldest universities and home to art giants Johann Sebastian Bach and Johann Wolfgang Goethe.
Leipzig Lad
His curls danced on his head as his fingers swam in the air. His bum bobbed back and forth as he bounced on the balls of his feet. Transfixed, his spirit transposed itself along with the music into something else altogether. Enraptured, he found himself enveloped in the eyes of the bigger boys before him — on cello, drums, and violin. Though a little leaner, longer, and their hair a little straighter, their childhood still clung like dirt on their wrinkled jeans and spit in their hair. The tenor timbre of their tune tingled the boy’s ears with excitement. He didn’t know that there were older people who still knew how to play in the middle of the day.
They were free — he could feel it — it’s how he had come to step out from the discreet cluster in the corner of the street. He stood alone before them — his soul too young to notice or to care. As the boy watched the young performers, he knew what he was to become. He knew what he was supposed to be and had the faith to believe. And as the rest of us watched the boy, we wished we knew the same.