This ritual
was interrupted by a phone call from a man named Frank who had gone to the
trouble of looking my name up in the phone book. I don’t know why anyone even
bothers to do this because no one has a listed phone number anymore. I still
do, and maybe Frank does.
He liked the
piece and in the course of a short conversation, we discovered numerous things we
had in common and decided to meet at a Panera’s for coffee later in the week.
There we spent several hours discussing politics and
government—we were both Democrats; immigration—we were both third generation
Italians from New York; and the world in general—we were both college educated,
had had successful careers, were now retired and both liked to write.
After
finally exhausting every topic, we said our good-byes but not before agreeing to
a second “meet-up” down the road.
This was
last November. The holidays came and went. He and his wife went on a cruise. My
wife and I continued our frequent visits to Richmond to see the kids and
grandkids. Many months went by until one day in early spring, I received an
e-mail asking if I wanted to get together again.
I did and we
agreed to meet again.
When I
arrived, he was already seated at the same table reading the newspaper’s
editorial page, just as he’d been doing the first time we met.
I came up
behind him and as I was taking my seat, I offered up my standard greeting.
“How’s it
going?”
He put his
paper down and looked up. “It looks like Clinton is going to win.”
“Yeah, I
think so. If she gets by Bernie, I don’t think she’ll have any trouble with
Trump.”
For the next
ten minutes, we discussed every facet of the on-going primaries and the issues
at stake. As you might expect, neither of us had changed our positions on
immigration, taxes and money in politics.
He reiterated
his family’s experience settling in New York City. I talked again about my
family’s arrival in Rochester, by way of Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania and
Bridgeport, Connecticut.
At this
point, he folded his paper, rose from his seat, told me he enjoyed talking to
me, but that he had to be moving along.
“Yeah, nice
talking to you,” I said as he walked away.
I watched
him light up a cigarette as he stepped outside the door.
My only
thought was, that was mighty short. We hadn’t seen each other in five months, I
had driven about 20 minutes to get here, and we’d only talked for about ten
minutes. Hell, my coffee was still too hot to pick up.
I was still working on it when a man approached my
table—a man who looked even more like the man I had talked to five months earlier
than the man I had just spent 10 minutes talking to.
“How’s it
going?” He asked as he sat down in his chair. “I see you have your coffee
already.”
“Yes I do. Just
waiting for it to cool. How have you been?”
I looked out
the window. The man I was just talking to who I thought was the man that I was
now talking to was still on the sidewalk, smoking his cigarette.
Had
Frank been waiting for this man to leave? Did he not want to interrupt us? Was
he waiting in the wings all that time wondering who my new friend was? Was I
going crazy?
If
he had seen us, he didn’t mention it. It never came up. For all I knew—and I
really didn’t know what I knew—he had only now just walked in when he sat down.
Whether it was true or not, I didn’t know—and I certainly wasn’t going to ask.
We talked
for a couple of hours about all of the same stuff we talked about the first
time we met, which happened to be the same stuff I had just finished talking
about with the stranger. When we said good-bye, we agreed to meet again.
“Maybe we
could start a discussion group,” he said.
He didn’t
know I was already working on it.
When I
arrived home, I walked in the door. My wife greeted me.
“How’d it
go?”
“Well, it
was a little strange.”
“How so?”
“Maybe you
should sit down.”
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