A Waiter and a Birthday Dinner

It was my man’s birthday Friday so we went out to dinner. (This is Old Dave as he looked in around the year 2000. He looks the same now only his hair is greyer.) Icould tell right away that our waiter at that restaurant was lonely for real conversation. He heard us talking about beers and spoke about a microbrewery he knew about.

He heard us talking about what it’s like to hike the Appalachian Trail and weighed in with a book recommendation about some guy who had done that with a house on his back or some extreme thing.

He heard our girl Annie and me trying to recall the last lines from Song of Myself and paused to listen. We finally looked it up on an i-phone and read it aloud.

“That’s beautiful,” he said of Whitman’s closing lines.

I asked for a glass of ice on the side and he told us he always forgets the ice so we should feel free to remind him. He did forget and we did have to remind him – twice – but it was fine.

I liked him and felt I understood the kind of loneliness in the rush-rush world of your average Friday night restaurant in a tourist area. It’s that certain alone-in-a-crowd loneliness of a person hungry for adult conversation. You see it in orthodontists too with their clientele of middle-schoolers.

Anyway it was a nice dinner and a nice 'real' birthday, last Friday, squeezed as it was between two losses by our poor Celtics. It certainly was a nice weekend.

I took Sunday off from blogging so I could look through pictures 100 years old of my people, thought of whom came sharply back when I went to see the house I grew up at the end of last week.

I’m on the verge of some more looking back, just to warn you. No more silly posts about underpants, for a few days anyway.

In the meantime here I am with a mate now eligible for Medicare. How the guy below turned into someone that old I don’t know. Course being the wife and not the mother I missed some of the early innings.

Tonight we're celebrating at the house of these two along with our other kids including the Whitman fan. The ‘these two’ have three young children, one at 14 weeks old just realizing what fun it is to laugh so it’s bound to be a good time, even for Old Dave. Hey for any of us to grow old and full of years: there are worse things, you know? (And few things better.)