Today my past came rushing up to meet me, in two very different ways. In the morning I saw an old familiar face, belonging to someone who knew me – back then – better than I knew myself; and in the late afternoon I discovered that this former employee of Freehills has become a news item on the company website due to my speech last week (see posts below).

Life twists and turns in ways that we don’t see coming and often don’t understand at the time. People and choices and experiences have consequences that change our lives; what comes next along our path is inevitably some reinterpretation, however tangential, of what came before it. Like the infinity symbol, repetition and transformation, in time and outside it, all at once.

A former regular reader of this blog got in touch recently and reminded me that I used to write about jazz a bit. Which reminded me I’d been remiss in not describing the wonderful Dave Holland Sextet gig I attended at Birdland in midtown a few short weeks ago. I even had a whole page of notes that I’d scribbled while sitting at one of the elegant little tables dotted around the venue.

The band opened with a fresh version of his existing composition “Modern Times” on the new CD, “Pass it On”. The buttery tone of Robin Eubanks’ cascading trombone solo was the cream atop the caffeine, Holland’s signature layering of a complex texture from a simple repeated motif (this one originating with Holland’s bass) that drives many of his compositions and welds the band together. The flugelhorn came in later and floated through the melodic line in a stunning contrast to the trombone and alto sax.

The addition of Mulgrew Miller at the piano seemed to take the entire Holland sound into new territory. I’ve loved the work Steve Nelson has done playing vibes on previous recordings, but I’m a fan of Mulgrew’s from way back. His lush chord voicings and glissandos make the most powerful contribution to the new flavour of the band.

The contrasts of light and dark, of charming melody and complex harmony, seemed to reflect the political yearning of the musicians. The political context was made more overt in Holland’s selection of “Equality” (his setting of a Maya Angelou poem) and the last song “Step to It” – which the bandleader introduced as “a little message for November”. One month out from the election, watching the tight-knit interaction of the musicians – hailing from all over the world, with skin of different colours, playing at the top of their game both individually and collectively - my heart filled with the hope that a 21 year-old white boy named David Holland, who came to the US and started playing with Miles Davis in the 1960s, might grow up to see a black man become President of the United States.

(PS Thanks for the link, Rick, but it has been removed from YouTube by the user. Pity, I was curious.)

Yesterday morning I was guest speaker at Freehills’ Women in Business Pink Ribbon fundraising breakfast, an annual event to assist the major fundraising initiative of their pro bono client, the National Breast Cancer Research Foundation. After flying in from New York less than 48 hours earlier, I had to set several alarm clocks to make sure I arrived on time. (On the right day.) I was honoured by the presence of many familiar faces among the 100-plus audience, which helped ease my nerves.

I’m thrilled to report the event raised $5949.00 from the attendees, which Freehills has matched to make a total of $11,898.00. This result is particularly pleasing because the matching gifts program was a founding element in the firm’s Community Program, which I developed and implemented during my tenure there. These days the community and pro bono programs have sensibly been brought together under the single umbrella of the Freehills Foundation.

I’ve been honoured with an invitation to be guest speaker at a Pink Ribbon Day event in Sydney on October 21st, so it’s with mixed feelings that I’m cutting short my current stint in New York. The event is one of many awareness- and fund-raising events held around Australia under the auspices of the National Breast Cancer Foundation to promote breast cancer awareness. While I’m fortunate in not having experienced breast cancer directly or indirectly in my family, I was invited to speak because of my career transition into the philanthropic and not-for-profit sector since leaving Freehills (the host of the event), and because of my experiences as a primary care-giver to my husband during his battle with cancer, which I wrote about in my book, The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement, published earlier this year.

So in the next week or two I must squeeze in a few more meetings with philanthropic advisers and not-for-profit executives and conduct more preliminary research for what I hope might eventually turn into another book. I’ve also been busy finalising two unexpected commissions – one from the Australian magazine Notebook and one from the British magazine Psychologies, for their respective January issues. (Once I finally work out how to upload PDFs and revise content on my website proper, rather than simply on this blog, then I will be able to share them once they’re published.)

Last weekend a friend’s teenage daughter went to an underage concert in Queens with some friends. While at the concert, the unworldly young lady draped her jacket over her backpack – containing her wallet, keys, MetroCard and mobile phone – and left it in a makeshift cloakroom while she danced happily in the other. Returning to the cloakroom she was devastated to find her things missing, and called her mother, with whom I had just finished watching the first Presidential Debate.

But the night took an unexpected turn. When her daughter arrived home, my friend called the mobile phone number and a man answered. He was a security guard at a building on the same block of the club, who had found the girl’s wallet and phone on the street outside the building. It was past midnight, but with his shift finished he was planning to hang out with his cousin who works at the Avenue A Gourmet Deli between 13th and 14th Street. The Deli happens to be in the same neighbourhood in which my friend and her daughter live. So at one o’clock in the morning my friend went to retrieve her daughter’s phone and wallet. She wrote to me:

Khaled was maybe about 30 or so, very sweet, but I imagine he would have trouble getting through airport security. He likely works long hours at minimum wage. I offered him a reward. He refused to accept it.