Pamela Windo

I’ve been thinking about traveling and the people I meet when I travel. How easily we connect to kindred spirits for a moment, and then let them go. And I was also thinking too about why I want to tell stories about my travels, the two being intertwined.

Before Facebook (et al), it used to be that people didn’t tell their stories. The only stories people wanted to hear were about the famous or the infamous: those who stood out from the crowd for fabulous fortune or unimaginable tragedy or crimes. When you stand out from the crowd, you no longer belong in it.

Nowadays, we all want to tell our stories; not just to family and friends but to those in the crowd, to those on the same journey. The Journey is where we reveal, explain, and show ourselves to others. We are all on our own personal journey. But then there are the communal journeys too, real and fictional, mostly religious pilgrimages of penance. Some that come to mind are: El Camino de Santiago de Compostela (The Way), and el Hajj, the Muslim’s pilgrimage to Mecca. Chaucer’s fictional Canterbury Tales was “a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims from all walks of life as they travel together to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.” All these journeys express a common yearning: we are part of this pilgrimage, we belong with these people, we have at least done this in our lives.

As for personal journeys, I am endlessly fascinated why some people move from place to place, city to city, even continent to continent, and why others stay all their lives where they were born. I am even more fascinated by personal stories. “He didn’t give me the time of day” is a saying that means, he didn’t acknowledge me; he didn’t look me in the eye; he didn’t see me for who I am. Was it because he thinks I am nobody, not worthy of his attention? At heart, we all want to be acknowledged, must be acknowledged for the human being we are. In our eyes is contained the story of our life. On the journey called El Hajj, (Hajj means to set out towards something) all items of everyday clothing are abandoned for white cloth, to make everyone equal in Allah’s eyes. Each pilgrim walks in a million-strong throng counter-clockwise seven times around the Kaaba, the cube-shaped building which contains the black stone, the Muslim’s focus of prayer. El Camino de Santiago de Compostela is a Roman Catholic pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela where the remains of St. James are said to lie. Today, people from all over the world walk the 500 miles, telling their stories to the other pilgrims they meet along the way. And in the Canterbury Tales, the stories are told by all the classes present: their stories, not their class, are the focus.

The movement forward, from a profane to a sacred place, brings a new space for understanding, for acceptance, tolerance and humility. But I think, in the end, the journey can also be one that takes place just where you are.

Fame and Fortune. What an odd thing, this urge to be famous.  (About the urge to be rich, more later). To be famous is to be widely known and celebrated… for something outstanding. So, to stand out from the crowd. Maybe it’s no more than an extension of the need all humans have to be ‘recognized,’ ‘acknowledged’ for who we think we are (or could be if we were recognized!).  In many cultures, and I saw it in Morocco, you must look the person you meet in the eyes, ask after his health and his family’s health, and in some way touch him or her–by a handshake, or a touching of cheeks, which is followed by putting one’s hand on one’s heart.

So, back to famous. While browsing the Internet the other day (looking for my name!), I came across the interview below: 
Tuba player extraordinaire Howard Johnson gave an interview with Roll Magazine about his involvement with John  Lennon.
When did you last speak to John?
“I spoke to him the night he died. I was going to bring John and Yoko a recording I had of Pam Windo — she’s married to a saxophone player named Gary Windo and she sang, frankly, something like Yoko did. She and her husband and another tenor player from her hometown of Bristol in England had a way of playing unison parts —the same notes but having it sound very strange because the pitches were dirty on one or both of them but their phrasing was exactly right. So it just ended up being a great sound that I thought John would like because these guys could also play in tune and John had talked to me about taking a horn section on tour. So I called the studio. Yoko answered the phone and passed it to John. I said, ‘I brought that record with the tenor players I’d like you to hear, should I bring it up to the studio?’ And he said, ‘We’re going to leave a little early tonight, bring it in tomorrow in the afternoon.’ And I thought, ‘Well, that’s good’ because I wanted to watch Monday night football. And Monday night football is what told us that he had been killed.”

Kevin Whitehead, NPR’s jazz critic, wrote to me:
“That is a weird tale. In some alternate universe, you may be more famous than you are already!”

So I might be famous in an alternate universe, something like Einstein’s space-time continuum theory.  And I didn’t mention, I have the same birthday as Bob Dylan. For now, I’m happy to be known by the people I know.