I am continually impressed with the way I can connect with so many different people these days. Most of this is done via the interwebs.

I was looking at some interesting pictures of a choir from Ghana on Facebook yesterday. I am a member of an organist Facebook group that is very diverse and world wide. I thought the pictures looked very cool. The people in them seemed relaxed and enjoying making music. I “liked” the pictures which one can do.

Not too long thereafter I received a “friend” request from someone named Kras Arthur Jr. I regularly get fake “friend requests” but usually with a little investigation I delete them. If I have a question I can click on the person and find out a bit more about them. I could see at a glance that this person was from Ghana and involved with music there. I instantly accepted the request.

In a little bit I received a Facebook comment from him thanking me. We went back and forth with messages. He told me which person he was in the pictures. He is seated at the far right at the keyboard in this picture.

Also yesterday I was reading a comment on an article about Church and Youth that has been floating around. I wanted to read more of the conversation but the way Facebook works I had to be friends with some of the commenters.

I recognized one of them as a Roman Catholic Publisher exec from World Library Publications in Chicago. I sent a friend request to him and one of the commenters that I agreed with. Within minutes the Publisher dude had accepted my friend request and before too long the other person had as well.

I mentioned my nephew in Florida in my blog yesterday.  His sister read it and messaged me on Facebook. She lives in Ohio. I have known both these people all their lives. We chatted back and forth briefly. A delight to catch up a bit with someone I care about (Hi, Cindy!) but don’t see in the flesh very often due to circumstances.

Then I noticed on Facebook,  that another nephew, Ben Jenkins, had posted a link to a music review blog post he had done. I went on and looked at it. I went back on Facebook and commented on his link asking him if he had every heard of a group I’m interested in right now called Future Wife.

He hadn’t. I sent him a link and he messaged me he was listening to it. Then he asked me if I had listened to the CD he bought me for Christmas. I thought I had but after putting it up on Spotify I realized I hadn’t heard it before so I played it while I cleaned.

Ben lives near Ann Arbor. I realized that we were sort of listening to each other’s music simultaneously. I found that kind of cool.

I noticed that Eileen had put up a new blog post on her Herrick Library blog. I thought that was cool as well and “shared” the link. Before long, it had been “liked” by all three of our adult children who are of course in widely dispersed geographic areas: Sarah in England, Elizabeth in China, and David in California.

I love this shit.

Finally, I was looking at book a friend gave me a few years ago.

I rediscovered that it’s a book of excerpts from a wide array of thinkers spread across time and diverse disciplines and religions and such.

I glanced at the chapter on Boethius.

When I was in grad school, the chair of the music department was Calvin Bower. His scholarly work was on Boethius and sure enough the chapter in this book drew on his translations and scholarship.

I was reminded of taking a look at his book on Boethius when I was in school. I went to the library and found it under Calvin (his first name). I gave him some shit about that, so important that the library just used his first name when filing his work.