Hello, everyone,

On June 27th I wrote A Writer’s Introduction to Google+ for Media Tapper Magazine, which chronicled the last several years of my moveable life with my surgeon husband, during which I continued to work at a job I love in New York, all the while trying to be a good wife and partner and maintain my friendships, and all that while trying to retain some semblance of a respectable writing schedule.  

During this last year of that moveable life I gratefully discovered that the dreaded social media was not so dreadful after all – Google+ gave me the opportunity to communicate with people I’d never met about things that matter to me, all the while allowing me to remain intellectually connected to a diverse group of people no matter my continually shifting geographic landscape and time zone.

But my first close encounter of the Media Tapper kind had been in an interview with the Magazine’s James Barraford way back on October 5, 2011 (http://mediatapper.com/giselle-minoli-interview-on-social-media/) in which I likened the conversations I was regularly having on G+ as similar to those held around the seminar table when I was a student at St. John’s College eons ago. Little did I know that by the time I would pen A Writer’s Introduction…. half a year after that conversation with James, that I would have had the pleasure of getting to know another two other Johnnies on G+,Leland LeCuyer and Meg Tufano.  It turns out that Meg and I, in a rather stunning bit of serendipity, actually roomed in the same dorm at St. John’s when we were Freshman many decades ago, although we did not know one another then.

St. John’s holds to a Liberal Arts curriculum stuffed with the Great Books, and in true classical fashion named its dorms after the Muses.  Ours was called Euterpe, the Muse of, variously, lyric poetry, music, joy, pleasure and flute playing.  When the Gods of St. John’s assigned me a room in Euterpe, they had no idea that I had played the flute for 7 years, nor that I was a lover of poetry (nor did I really, at that time), nor that I would leave college to work in the music business.  But that’s yet another bit of serendipity altogether.

The attached story is really a paean to re-meeting Meg Tufano all these years later on G+, and to a particularly feelingful email I received from her at a time when I really needed to receive a particularly feelingful email from someone who had experienced what I was experiencing this past summer when my house was attacked by a plague of water and mold.

While I don’t really believe in serendipity (I don’t think), I do believe in Muses and music and flute playing and joy and pleasure.  Here’s to those things and everything else that matters to each of us individually.

And here’s to Meg.  Sometimes meeting later is ever so much better than meeting sooner.

Have a good week.

Giselle

P.S.  In case you missed it in Media Tapper, A Writer’s Introduction to Google+ appears at the end of the attached story.

http://www.giselleminoli.com/writing/