A Bluegrass Connection

I love Bluegrass and early country music and am something of an aficionado. I attended the first few multi-day Bluegrass festivals, centered around the career of Bluegrass founder Bill Monroe, in Fincastle, VA in 1965 and '66. A few years later, as an undergraduate, my room-mate and I attended Bill Monroe's "Brown Country Jamboree", in Bean Blossom, IN, one week-end. A surprising thing happened at Bean Blossom. We arrived in the middle of torrential downpour. We parked and started slogging our way through the mud toward the stage area, when whom should we see but James Monroe, Bill's son, coming our way. He stopped and asked me if I could do him a favor. I said "Of course". He pulled out a wad of paper money about 5 inches thick and said, "Could you bring this over to the attendant at the parking lot? He's out of change." Of course, I did it, but I marveled that James Monroe would trust some long-haired, long-bearded hippie kid with a wad of money. Maybe he thought I had an honest face, or maybe he recognized me from Fincastle a few years earlier. Either way, I felt honored. We now fast-forward about 40 years. I'm a participant in an internet discussion group on classic country music. Bluegrass occasionally would up, and this time someone mentioned James Monroe. I told the above story, saying that this happened either in 1969 or 1970, but I wasn't sure which. Another regular in the group immediately responded. "Let's see. The year of the big rain -- that was 1970. And the attendant in the parking lot was me!" When this occurred, it didn't feel supernatural to me. I experienced it as an unlikely but beautiful surprise that this long-ago, treasured interaction was illuminated by a shared memory after the passing of so many years. A connection was made with a shadowy stranger in the original story, who turned out to be someone whom I had known pretty well for a while on-line. I felt as if a circle of very large radius had just been closed.