Dear Diary:

It happened like this: The cabdriver, an older man, had an earphone in and was talking on his phone. I thought I heard a Haitian accent. I prefer that cabdrivers not talk on their phones.

“If you get off the phone,” I said, “I’ll sing you an old Creole song.”

He hung up immediately. I sang the song.

“Lovely,” he said, “but I’m from Nigeria.”

“Do you know a Nigerian song you could sing me?” I asked.

He turned around and smiled, and sang a nice song. While he was singing, I remembered an African song I had learned years before at the Omega Institute. When he finished, I sang it for him.

“Beautiful,” he said. “Not my dialect, but I could hear the trees. Here’s another.”

And he began to sing me a song as we started down my block. I began to learn it and started to harmonize (it was a long block!). A first for me, but at my age, you can toss a lot of caution to the wind.