Stupendous Serendipity

I didn’t catch his name, but will never forget his face and gaze. I saw him while navigating a human crowd in Varanasi. (The population density there, per square mile, is more than twice the average elsewhere in India.)

Greg Brown wrote many songs that stay with me, but a single lyric revisits me more than any other: “I could be to you, or you could be to me just another face in the crowd.“

I realize that I do not take pictures of crowds, and rarely photograph individual humans. But I frequently photograph animals who stand out in crowds. A giant floof at a hopping brewery. Llamas at a Farmers’ Market. Flocks and murmurations of birds. Seagulls contemplating sunrise. Dogs walking themselves on congested city streets. Deer Park in Delhi. A young man tending to a gaggle of goats in Morocco. Camels surveying their kingdom.

These are all serendipitous encounters.

Indeed, I rarely take pictures of people, let alone crowds of them. When I find myself in a crowd, my camera seeks out the visible wonders above the fray or beneath my feet. I wonder if it is a product, or projection, of the high value I put on privacy, and against unvolunteered disclosure.

There are exceptions.

From any angle and distance, I can pick out one of my children gathering a diploma in a crowd of tens of thousands, or marching in rows of identically outfitted students in a dance troupe or marching band.

Serendipity tends to play a significant role in the most important decisions in our lives. My late husband would have been just a face in the crowd had he not spent a disappointing weekend with hard-drinking frat boys at the college he planned to attend, and instead ended up in New Jersey, where I met him in a laboratory course. I would not have been in that class had our undergraduate institution not required us liberal artsy types to take some solid science subjects. Or had I not visited that school in full-on cherry blossom season, while checking out otherwise tempting prospects in hip-high (at least for me) gray snowdrifts.

When we married and had a family of our own, one-of-a-kind faces were added to countless crowds, some in very distant places. Irreplacable faces I will always get lost in, as I continue to revisit and savor each face and phase preserved in pictures as they grew.

Had my future husband and I instead passed by one another as strangers, subsequent crowds would of course contain different humans than our children. Their friends and partners and partners’ families would not have come into, and become enduring important parts of, our lives.

I’ve only once regretted having someone serendipitously encountered come into our lives, a decent record, but still hard for a wary prosecutor who still clutches her belongings in any crowd to fathom. I have been so lucky to know the rest.

I treasure all the people who’ve stayed in our lives and could instead have been just faces in a crowd.