Yesterday afternoon at the Phillips Collection concert, I was sitting in the front row next to an elegantly dressed couple who explained they were from Seoul, Korea and had known the pianist, a young woman apparently also Korean, "since before she was born." However, she was born in Montreal and gives concerts internationally. The husband said he learned she was playing in Washington yesterday from a newspaper and contacted her parents, his good friends, in Montreal. She and they were obviously fond of each other, indicated by warm smiles as she took her bows only seven or eight feet from them in the intimate setting of that music room. The wife stepped forward briefly to hand her a bouquet of red roses.
This caused me to reflect on how common international friendships and even families are. A friend of mine who worked at the World Bank had, at one time, her four children each living and working in a different country - the United States, New Zealand, Canada and Thailand. Yet she was in constant communication via the Internet. Does the enabling of such relationships more than offset some of the lamented displacement by email of face-to-face communication?
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