A true story

I was hiking along the path in the park. I was enjoying the exercise, the sun, wind, trees, and grass. It was a beautiful day. I felt very much "present," in the "zone," as it were.

I had been thinking much of the time about the lost & found project, its simplicity and utility, how much I was going to learn and most importantly, what to name it. Every project has to have a code name. It seems somehow to give the effort a kind of center of gravity.

At any rate, a middle age couple, a man and woman, happened to be coming in my direction as I had made my way up the hill. The man stopped, stooped, and picked up an item. I saw it was a necklace, a long chain with a pendant of sorts.

As he stood up and at the instant we passed one another, I overheard him ask his partner, "Do you know if they have a lost and found here"?

Perhaps this was nothing more than a meaningless coincidence. But, I wondered, what was the chance? At that moment, on that day, we're there, the necklace is there, I'm thinking of this, he says that?

I didn't know.

I chuckled and took this little incident to be a hopeful sign of good luck, namely, that I was on the right track--and in more ways than one!

And to acknowledge that sense of good luck and not waste it, I decided to name this project, Umbo, after the  album, Umbo Weti: A Tribute to Leon Thomas (2009), by Babatunde Lea.