My wife and I had taken an overnight flight from New Zealand into San Francisco. We would spend the next night there, waiting for our flight the next morning that would take us home to the East Coast.
We were still full of the bright and sunny New Zealand days when we stepped out into the cold gray drizzle of a San Francisco afternoon. We took a cab to our hotel near the airport in south San Francisco to wait out our time. It was a chain hotel, well used and a bit tired, a corporate afterthought.
By the time we left the hotel to find dinner, it was colder, darker and flat out raining. The man at the reception desk told us that it was only several blocks to the main street, where we would find local restaurants. With our umbrellas in one hand, we were scouring Yelp in our other hand for restaurant recommendations when we made it to Grand Avenue.
We walked up and down Grand Avenue in the rain, looking at the restaurants and comparing them to our smartphones. We were not seeking paradise, but just looking for something acceptable. We honed in on a well-reviewed Japanese restaurant, but when we turned the corner we saw a long line out in the rain.
We walked up and down the avenue, some of the restaurants were closed, some of them were seedy, some of them had no customers inside and some of them had bad reviews.
We passed by another Japanese restaurant, a hole in the wall, though filled with patrons. We went in, it was warm and humid, and the tables, chairs and walls were all in the dark wood, as was the sushi bar and stools in the front. There was one open table in the back corner. We happily took it.
The waitress was lovely, a Japanese woman dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. We ordered dinner, and then spent some time with the waitress being guided through their extensive list of sake. We took her recommendation and she brought the bottle well before the food arrived. It was a beautiful wine, cool, thick and milky, with a flavor of rice and coconuts and plums. Neither of us could stop sipping it. Dinner eventually arrived.
The people at the next table left, the table was cleared, and out of the corner of my vision I noted that a solitary person sat down and took a menu. At some point during dinner I looked over at our new neighbor. I would guess that he was young and in his 30s, large and athletic looking with neatly cropped black short hair and a well-trimmed black beard. He had bright blue eyes, and was wearing an unadorned white T-shirt. Brightly colored tattoos oozed down his arms from under the short sleeves.
As we neared the end of our dinner, it was clear that we were never going to be able to finish the bottle of sake, and it seemed a terrible waste to have it poured down the drain. I turned toward our T-shirted neighbor, excused myself, and asked him if he liked sake. He said that he did, and of course wondered why I had asked. And so I explained our predicament.
He smiled and declined our offer of half a bottle of sake. He had just flown to San Francisco himself, you see, and had to be bright and sharp at his work the next morning.
The conversation unrolled, and he had an easy way about him. He let us in to some of his story. He was a technology consultant, working for a smallish firm outside of Philadelphia. They had clients throughout the country, but he had an ongoing involvement with a client in San Francisco. He was here often. He hated leaving his wife and daughter behind for the days he had to be on the West Coast.
He had been married for seven years and he had a 17-year-old daughter. Yes, he knew he looked young to have a 17-year-old child, as he was 33 years old. He was 16 when his daughter was born, and his then girlfriend took off immediately. For the first 10 years he had raised her by himself. She was a very good student and an athlete. He smiled. He knew that given the way he was as a teenager, the only thing which could have straightened him out was either raising this girl or signing up for the military.
He met his wife when he was working himself through college. He adored her. He also found himself to be very lucky because his wife’s family fully accepted him and fell in love with his daughter. His in-laws were happy to help in raising his daughter. He was now in the planning stages of thinking about her and college. We talked a bit about our experiences with our two children while we were looking at colleges with them, and offered some advice about things that worked and didn’t work for us.
It was well beyond the end of dinner, and it was time for us to go. As we were saying goodbye, he looked at us and said that he was the luckiest guy in the world, that this woman would marry a fool with a beard and a 10-year-old child.
As we were about to open our umbrellas and walk out into the rain, I looked back at him for a moment. I’ve always thought that there is a type of person among us who is the glue that holds everything together. This guy is one of them. His wife was either smart or lucky to marry him.
Jay Fleitman, MD, of Northampton writes a monthly column. He can be reach ed at opinion@gazettenet.com.