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AN EXCERPT FROM MY DREAM JOURNAL

Feb. 19, 1982 - Dream
I’m with some Oriental girl… It’s somewhat romantic. We’re fooling around walking down the street.

Two months after this dream, I met Setsuko (my wife-to-be) in Japan while touring with Simon and Garfunkel. She came to our first concert at the Osaka baseball stadium. (Some years after we were married, she told me that when she saw me onstage her body shook and she felt some kind of “destiny”). After the concert that night, Setsuko found the hotel where I was staying and left me a long letter with her phone number, saying she’d like to meet me to say 'hello'. She simply wanted to make a connection with me for her best friend from junior high school who had died. Setsuko told me that I was her friend’s favorite musician in BS&T. Her friend had been a musician. So when I got back to the hotel late that night, I called Setsuko. When she answered, I asked, “Is this Suzuki?” (Fred, the ugly American had pronounced her name wrong)!! But she was gracious. The next day, when I came down to the lobby to meet her, Setsuko waved to me from across the room. She immediately looked like an old friend, and for a brief moment, although still in her late-twenties, she had the look of a wise old woman. When I finished my tour of Japan and Europe with Simon and Garfunkel, Setsuko visited me in the Bronx, as we had planned. On a humid summer day, the two of us walked down a street in Manhattan, just like in my dream!

An interesting footnote is that Setsuko and her friend loved Simon and Garfunkel. That was, until BS&T came along and became their favorite group! In 1971, the two teenage girls had front row seats for the afternoon BS&T concert in Osaka. After the tickets for that show were sold out the promoters added a second show that night, which Setsuko and her friend also attended. I never met the girls then, although Setsuko later told me that she and her friend passed by me in the hotel on their way to the restaurant on the lower floor. My hotel and the concert hall were connected.