Unexpected songs come along the people you meet at trains

by Davi Tekle Scherer (Brazil)

Making a local connection Sweden

I look back to the year 2011. Now, nearly ten years afterwards, the memories of my trip to Sweden at a young age of eighteen come back to me vividly while I make a new playlist in my phone with songs that I first discovered all those years ago. What was that man’s name? The man I met on a train on the way to Saltsjöbaden? The man who first introduced me to one of my favorite bands until today, The Specials. The story goes as follows. I had just finished high-school, and since I didn't know whether I wanted to go to university or gain experience first, I decided I would visit my relatives in Stockholm, Sweden, and take up a few language and art courses. I had pale memories of the city in my childhood, the long, windy and snow filled roads and parks of a Christmas long passed, but this time around I would finally see it during the spring and summer days of blossoming flowers, glimmering channels and golden eternal daylight. A few weeks after I had arrived, my father also took a plane to Stockholm and settled himself in a nice seaside hotel at Saltsjöbaden, a peninsula in the city of Nacka, just south of Stockholm, and invited me to visit him. So one Saturday morning I took a train in Slussen to make the trip. We had a wonderful day together at the seaside. We both are very interested in photography and the scenery there was perfect to make portraits. We walked the shore and the woods, looking at the departing and arriving sailboats off the channel and had big glass of beer together, the first I ever drank with my father, before saying farewell. Already on the train, on my way back to Stockholm, while I'm looking at the pictures I took during the day, a middle-aged man starts speaking loudly to people inside the wagon. My swedish was still very incipient at this point, so I don't understand what the man is saying, but from the expressions other people are making and the way the turn their gaze away from him, I then realize he is making annoying remarks. Suddenly he turns and looks to look at me, and when he notices I'm paying attention to him, he comes over to where I'm sitting and heavily puts himself on the seat opposite of me. Something gives him the hint I'm a foreigner and he asks me where I'm from. "I'm brazilian" I tell him in english while smiling. He likes this because I see him open up too. We switch to english and he asks me if I like music and I reply that I do, very much so. He tells me he used to be in a band in the '80s which I'm not familiar with. He says they used to play ska and that he even lived in England, playing with on occasion with The Specials, but told him I also don't know them. "You don't know the Specials?" he asks appalled. And then he started do sing loudly "This town is coming like a ghost town, all the clubs have been closed down" for all the wagon to hear. "How don't you know this music?" he asked. I had never heard of ska or The Specials before, but since then I would also never forget. His name was Martin, he played in band called the Sharptones. He was too shy for letting me take his picture, but he openly invited me for a glass of beer as we arrived at the Slussen train station. I declined, but now I wish I hadn't. Had I told him I was a huge fan of The Rolling Stones at the time maybe he would have let me take his portrait. As soon as I reached home I put on The Specials to play and since then it never stopped being my tune.