The T Shirt

I belong to a group who puts on a folk music festival (the South Country Fair) the 3rd weekend of July every year in a relatively small town (population less than 3,000) in Southern Alberta, Canada. The festival is not huge by some standards - lets say 1200 attendees or so a year - but we have our own merchandise which includes SCF shirts for our attendees and one in a different colour for our volunteers. In the summer of 2010 my future son-in-law silk screened a batch of SCF T shirts for the directors, let's say 50 or so shirts. There may have been more but that's the number I recall. In May of the following year my 82 year old dad and I were in Accra, Ghana. Dad had moved our family from Saskatoon Canada to Cape Coast Ghana in 1969 where we'd lived for 5 years. This was our first trip back and we had hired a driver to take us to the home of an old friend of dads that he hadn't seen in 40 years. Accra has a population of over 1.5 million and we'd been driving for over an hour, winding deeper and deeper in to the city while our driver was on and off the phone with our friend, finding our way to his home. By this point we were on red clay roads, with single story buildings surrounding us and not many street markers, relying only on our friend at the end of the line to guide us through the maze. When our driver's SIM card ran out of money then, we had to find a spot to pull over and buy another one at one of the many kiosks lining the road. We pulled over and stopped. The streets were packed with pedestrians and vehicles. I looked up to see a man walking towards us wearing THE VERY T-SHIRT THAT MY FUTURE SON-IN-LAW HAD MADE 10 MONTHS PRIOR. I dismissed it as having been mistaken, turned to my dad but then thought I better confirm. And as the man walked by, I could see it very clearly. I knew the person that had made that exact T shirt. I leapt out of the car and ran down the street to stop him and ask him about the shirt. I must have startled him and I think frightened him a bit but I wanted to know the story. Sadly I was not able to figure it out as he didn't speak English but I did get a photo with him to prove that it really happened. While half way across the world, in a city of over 1.5 million, I looked up to see a man wearing one of 50 T shirts my son-in-law made 10 months prior. I'll never forget that moment.