ARTery

I often fall asleep on a sofa in my own sitting room, but rarely in the homes of strangers.  One recent Saturday night, however, I did exactly that, although--in my defense--only after being invited to close my eyes. And no, it was not a hypnosis session; I was at a concert. The person who suggested the eye closure was one of the musicians, the percussionist/violinist/ uielleann-piper, Oisin.

So I let my lids fall. During the intermission, the hostess, Kassandra, had brewed and shared out a large pot of soothing herbal tea, which perhaps didn't help with alertness. I noticed that many of us looked extremely relaxed.

Some of the audience sat on a sofas while others lay sprawled on cushions on the floor (the younger ones) or perched on kitchen chairs, or leaned on walls. The music, a mixture of Celtic, Middle Eastern, Appalachian, and Balkan folk tunes, filled the space, and drew us together in enjoying it. In general when I attend a concert I do not remember much if anything about the people sitting nearby, but as I recall this event a month later, I can envision my fellow guests very clearly. There was a knot of young women who curled up together, heads on each other's laps, at my feet. On a couch perpendicular to mine sat Jim and his wife. We had arrived at the same time as this couple and chatted a little in the lift coming up. "Don't I know you?" Jim eventually asked my husband. It turned out that they belonged to the same college at the university.

We were all there in Kassandra's flat because of an innovation called "ARTery," described to me by its founder as "like Air BnB for culture and the arts." The founder, Selima, and I were seated in the same row of an Air Canada flight from Vancouver to Toronto late last year. Normally I don't talk to strangers on a plane, at least not till near the end of the journey, because once you start it can be hard to end, and I enjoy the odd solitude of flying, of time to myself in a crowd of others. But during this journey I was not entirely myself. For one thing, I had turned into a bag lady, boarding the plane with easily half a dozen separate receptacles--a hiking backpack, a smaller drawstring backpack in a red-and-white Yayoi Kusama design, a pretty blue floral nylon bag-for-life, and a couple of plastic carrier bags containing shoes and my dinner (two separate bags), hiking boots tied together and strung over my shoulders. Normally I would have consolidated these items into a suitcase, but I had somehow managed on this occasion to leave my suitcase behind when I headed to the Vancouver airport and by the time I realized, it was too late to go back and retrieve it.

But that's another story. Selima, in the aisle seat, waited patiently while I stowed my load in various compartments. And then it turned out that someone from the conference I had been attending in Vancouver was seated a couple of rows ahead and he walked back to visit with me, leaning over my poor neighbor, until the crew secured the cabin doors and he returned to his seat. My conversation with Selima thus began with apologies and ended with.... well, it didn't, at least not in the air. We found one compelling topic after another. Finally I said, "I'd better try to grab a quick nap."

She looked at her watch and said, "Leslie, I'm sorry to tell you this, but we land in twenty minutes. No nap for you." I gaped. We had talked for five hours. And then Selima offered me a lift home in her Lyft, where we talked some more. She is one of the most interesting people I have ever met.

She's remarkable, in fact. One remarkable achievement is her foundation, with a friend, of ARTery, an organization or a network with the tagline "culture is more than content: it's connection" (About Artery). After years stationed as a journalist in the Middle East and in Washington, D.C. Selima felt the need to work at making something more than content, something to generate connection, and ARTery was born. It currently operates in Toronto and in New York City.

The ARTery  event I attended with my husband that evening last month in Kassandra's apartment above High Park, "A Small Wee Concert Vol 2", did just that trick.  It fostered connection. Husband and I connected with Jim, and with Jim's wife, with our hostess Kassandra, and with others in the room, not all of whose names we learned (or remembered-- so sorry, Jim's wife). But we talked. We deepened our connection with our friend Willy who accompanied us. And I made a small wee connection of the sleepy kind with Kassandra's sofa. (Willy confessed that he did, too.) I trust no one minded. I also hope I did not snore, or if I did, that Oisin's uielleann pipes drowned me out. The music was beautiful and memorable, the ambience almost opposite that of the anonymity of the concert hall.

So, thank you, Selima! And by the way I did get my suitcase back, thanks to a friend who posted on Instagram that she was in Vancouver for a few days and who kindly agreed to shepherd it home to Toronto.

What wonderful, connected world it can be.