A Day for the Music and Love…

Last week I had to go to Houston Downtown to meet a recruiter with a staffing agency. So, I booked Uber as I don’t have a car. Johnny, the Uber driver was a musician from Colombia. The estimated travel time showed around 45 minutes on the App. So, I started the conversation with him. We had some really interesting topics for the day as he is a musician.

Johnny plays the Trumpet with some bands in the city and also travels to different places as part of his job and works as Uber driver for part-time. He said he was practicing English as he just moved to the US a couple of years ago and in many countries, English is not taught as a mandatory language. I felt his English was good enough for a conversation.

Since he said he recently moved to the US, I asked him, “Johnny, what brings you to the United States?”

He said, “My wife who was my girlfriend back then lives in the US. So, I had to come here to be with her.”

I congratulated him on his married life and asked him, “So, do you like it here so far?”

Johnny said, “Well, life is really really different from what it was in Colombia.”

I totally agree with what he said. Life here in the USA is different for me too. When I asked him to explain more about his experience so far, He said he just moved to Houston from New Jersey 3 months back. He was travelling to NYC and playing the trumpet for 2 years. But, he couldn’t survive with the money he earned there as it was expensive to live and perform there for petty amounts. He clearly seemed to miss his carefree lifestyle back in Colombia. That’s why he said life is different now.

I asked him about his wife and how did they meet if she was in the US.

Then Johnny narrated a long story in short,

“When I was in Colombia, I was a reasonably famous musician. People know me and follow me on Facebook. I used to date many girls because I had so many options (he smiles and repeats, did I say I was a bit famous?) and I was only attracted to beautiful women. After all the broken relationships I had, I was tired of such women who would send me Facebook requests because I was famous. I usually prefer that I would approach a woman rather than a woman approaching me.

One day, I received a friend request from a girl. Initially, I thought it was just another message from one of those women and ignored it. Later on, I got a message from her saying she knew me from someone who worked with me in the past. Then, I just replied to her in a casual way saying hello. She was also from Colombia but came to the US in search of a job and she works with a Hair and Nails company in NYC. Slowly, we used to text and talk every day and didn’t even realize when we started liking each other. Finally, both of us realized that we were deeply in love and I had decided to move to the US.”

The silver lining of the story was that Johnny said he met many women who were more beautiful than his wife but none of them made him feel the way she did. I guess that’s what and why they call it love. He said now they have a year old daughter and are happy with their life.

We ended our conversation in a funny way. He asked me if I would be okay to meet someone online and fall in love with him. I said, “No, never”, straight away but, Johnny said, “You never know. So, you should never say never.” I sighed and said I would wait and see if that happens. He wished me luck with that and we departed. Of course, I gave him a 5-star rating with a thank you note for the lovely conversation!

Now comes the most surprising part that has never happened to me before. My return Uber trip was with Nester from Arabia who asked me to guess where he was from as soon as I got into the car. While I was thinking, I was about to say somewhere from the Middle East, he gave me two options Mexico, Arabia. I guessed it right from his Middle Eastern accent.

After a while, I asked him, "what do you do besides driving for Uber?".

He said he was a musician. I was surprised and told him, “Today, I have been meeting many musicians. I just met one on my previous trip.”

He asked me more about it and when I described Johnny and his story, in short.

Nester got surprised, "That's my friend! I know Johnny as we both work in the same band".

This had definitely blown my mind. Both of us got excited about it and he said he would let Johnny know about this conversation. I was too shocked to take it as a mere coincidence. I reached home rolling my memory back and forth thinking of the day well spent in the rides.