So I'm sitting in a plane over the North Atlantic, and the pilot tells us to buckle up, flight attendants stop serving the chicken, we are entering some turbulence. Two men a couple of rows behind me start singing. They sing quietly, no louder than the conversations going on around me, in a singsang sort of voice - Ah-aaah-aaahaaaah ... I cannot quite make out the words. For more, read the card with safety instructions beneath the orange lifevest.
Have I mentioned that the two men had beards? after half an hour they were still singing. They also were wearing some vaguely oriental garb, and of course they were dark-skinned.
That enough for you, melanin-challenged Christian readers? you start thinking about racial profiling, and how Juan Williams said once that he was OK with it?
Well, I finally caught some snippets of the mens' conversation. One kept singing, and the other one made suggestions: "I think that needs to be a D flat [unintelligible] major second [mumble mumble] F minor scale ..."
and then the other one sang the same bit again, presumably with a D flat and a major second in it.
To those of you who give me the blank stare: these few words tell me that the two men can read music, and not just that: they did not improvise this little chant, it followed some rigid rules. They probably had it written down somewhere, perhaps right in front of them on their phones, and they were somehow trying to correct it, or improve it. And the musical language they were speaking was the language of classical, Western music - in one word, they were my brothers!
The words may have been "come to Jesus" after all, and not "allahu akbar" - but does it matter at this point? I am a Christian, but honestly, the "D flat" brought us closer together than any hint of religion could have done.
Oh yes, and on second glances, the 'vaguely Oriental garb' was a sweater with a hoodie, and the blanket that the airline gives you - it is *cold* at 30,000 feet over the North Atlantic.
But the beards were real.
I am happy to report that the men did *not* get jumped by hysterical passengers, nobody even complained. This was just a lesson about the power of preconceptions.