While walking toward Trinity campus and The Pig’s Ear restaurant yesterday, my study abroad group came upon a Guitar playing busker. He was quite good, and there was a large crowd gathered around. We were on a major pedestrian thoroughfare that I had visited often to shop at while on my undergraduate Dublin abroad, and hearing his playing reminded me of that previous time in this place. Though I could not remember the street’s name, I knew that I had heard buskers before, though perhaps none had been as talented as this guitar player.

The busker’s skill was not what had gathered the crowd around him, though. A young child with a cherry red plastic guitar was standing a few feet from him, legs splayed, leaning over the guitar to seethe strings and plucking at them with obvious joy. This scene was, of course, picturesque in the extreme and, even if it was fabricated, I was struck by it.

This blond headed child was living an experience of early childhood joy. Whether he was playing that red guitar with the busker in a moment of circumstance or had been brought to that street to draw in crowds for the busker,  this moment, or those like it, would form a foundation for his development over the course of the rest of his life.  It is a unique experience–and one enabled by the individual qualities of Dublin–and, were I to have traveled all this way just to have observed this moment in a miscellaneous child’s life, the trip would be worthwhile.