The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Salt Lake City, UT
Sometimes it’s hard not to feel a bit like Forest Gump. No, not because I’m slow-witted (although that is often true, too) or a prodigious runner (which is decidedly never true) but because occasionally it feels like I’m unknowingly dropped in the middle of history’s great events.
Watching the famed Mormon Tabernacle Choir practice isn’t exactly like giving John Lennon the starting lines to Imagine or being hosted by Richard Nixon at the Watergate hotel, but it felt a little out of body just the same – like I was witnessing something extraordinary that I had no right to be a part of.
In truth, there was nothing really unusual about the experience. The Choir practices almost every Thursday night and is magnanimous enough to open their doors to all comers free of charge. We were hardly the only ones to take them up on the offer. And yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that I shouldn’t have been there at all.
In some alternate history, perhaps my real or proper history, I don’t even visit Salt Lake City, Utah. Instead I’m back in Hoboken going through the normal paces of life and playing out the same script that seems written for everyone. But this storyline is different. Here I am running around the world and inserting myself into places that weren’t intended for me. Am I changing the future the way Forest did? I don’t know. But, then again, neither did he.
All I can do is keep moving and enjoying this amazingly improbable ride.
Or said differently: Run Forest, Run!
