I walked through Boston’s Public Garden on Friday on my way to a lunchtime meeting in Cambridge at MIT.

 

I hardly noticed the stunningly beautiful fall day.  Through most of my stroll through the garden, I was silently lecturing someone who had pissed me off that morning.

 

A man playing an erhu snapped me out of it.  The sound of that Chinese string instrument is haunting, almost agitating, yet eerily beautiful.  And the sound beckoned me back — back to the moment, back to the wondrous day that it was.

 

I had never seen this musician before — not anyone playing the erhu — in nearly two decades of walking this path.

 

I passed through the Public Garden again on my way back from Cambridge, this time silently lecturing someone who had pissed me off the day before.

 

Until I heard that sounds again.

 

How tempting the catnip.  How wonderfully, strangely, reliably we’re beckoned back . . .