If your are an old man with any compassion, you contemplate, think about all the what if’s occurring in your life. At least, i do.

It is also a time to deal with loss. Friends, family of my generation are going to another place. i wonder why. i recognize it could be me. i moan i cannot have more time with those leaving me behind. i am contrite from not being able to explain misunderstandings, misperceptions we did not resolve. i miss the good times we had together.

This past week was a whammy for me.

Our neighbor, Morice “Spud” Mumby, took the ultimate hit early Saturday morning. Spud lived across the street from us. He and his wife Vonda were two of the original folks on our cul de sac. Thirty years. Spud was a curmudgeon, a term of praise for friends by men my age. Spud was a Navy helicopter pilot who served in Vietnam, a retired commander, realtor afterward, and…well, he was Spud. He was from the past: a hunter, someone who lived off the land. Mounted deer heads, other game skeletons, taxidermy marvels of game he or Vonda had gained. He served us his venison, sausage, quail, pickled quail eggs, made his own wine, and provided me  the best port i’ve have ever had. He was a realist who cared. i cannot think of a better description for a man of our age. We spent hours outside our houses, on the street even, talking about how screwed up the world has become.

The world is a bit more empty in the Southwest corner for me.

Then i finally confirmed another special person in my life had also passed into the other side. In August 1959, John Sweatt became my hero. i was a diminutive sophomore on the varsity football pre-season practice. We reported to Castle Heights two weeks before school started, pre-season practice. John showed us where we would be for those two weeks. It was on the second floor barracks of Smith Chapel. There was no quarter for the two-a-days, and considered sissy to drink water, and de riguer to swallow salt tablets. “95-95” we used to describe the temperature and humidity. Brutal. Loved it. And John would gather up the town boys after the morning practice and drive us to Johnson’s Dairy where we would buy half-gallon cartons of orange drink. The juice would be gone before we returned from the one-mile drive.

Then came his gift to me. Newport, Rhode Island, September 1967. We were in our second week of OCS, where first class cadets were our drill instructors. Not good. It was a month of a hell week. During the first weekend, i had called John. He was a lieutenant junior grade, an engineer on the USS Basilone (DD 824) home ported in Newport. We talked and promised to get together.

That Tuesday after the evening mess, our DI wannabes called us out for a room inspection. Doc Jarden, my roommate and i, like every other fourth class OC, was standing ramrod straight at attention flanking the door into our room. The inspector, a first class OC, delighted in being the bad guy and was picking his way through the first room in the passageway. In one week, he had managed to give us the impression he was Satan incarnate. We were almost in fear of him.

John entered the other end of the passageway. After Basilone’s liberty call, he came over to King Hall and climbed up the stairwell. When he entered in his service dress blues, he might as well have been the Chief of Naval Operations, the four-star admiral. If possible, the OC’s stood even straighter as he came past them. Our barracks room was two down from where the DI was having his fun. John motioned with his head for us to go into our room. i introduced him to Doc. John sat on the rack, put his cover on the desk, and pulled out a pack of Winton’s, offering one to each of us, which we accepted. We began to talk, mostly about home.

The DI emerged from his lashing the first room’s occupants for unsat quarters. He saw two of his OC’s were not in their proper stances by the door. He charged into the room ready to read us the riot act or worse.

As he entered, the DI realized there was a real Naval officer sitting on the rack in front of him. He was confused. He had on his inspection cover, but it was improperly pushed back on his head.  He couldn’t  conclude whether he should pull his cover down and salute, salute and then pull his cover down, take off his cover and salute, or salute and take off his cover, which produced a flurry of hand waves in front of his face.

John dismissed the DI who hurried out of our room. Doc and i laughed. John had given me balance, allowed me to see the hilarity in an Officer Candidate lording over guys who were just three months behind him in training. It was all much easier after John’s visit, and i could never thank him enough.

There were others after us, but, as far as i know, John, Earl Major, Lee Dowdy, Bobby Bradley, and i were the only Heightsmen town boys from my four years up the hill who were Navy officers. Bobby graduated from the Naval Academy. He lost his life when his aircraft crashed into the Atlantic before Earl  graduated from Auburn and was commissioned and before i went to OCS. The other four of us passed each other at various duty stations for years. Lee finished his four-year obligation and earned his doctorate in international relations. He is retired, living in Montgomery, Alabama, with his wife Teppe. Earl and i hooked up in Newport in 1973 when we both went through the department head course at Destroyer School and continued to be close with assignments in Long Beach, San Diego, and places near. We remained close until he passed, including his last night where we watched a basketball game together in his hospital room in Rosarita Beach, Mexico.

John’s last sea tour was as the executive officer of the USS Samuel Gompers (AD 34). My last sea tour was as the executive officer of the USS Yosemite (AD 19). i have often thought about the irony. After the Navy, John and Suzanne spent their time in Destin, Florida and Colorado. Of course, i have remained in the Southwest corner. i never, ever spent enough time with John after that autumn of Tiger football in 1963. Now, i can’t.

John and Spud are good men. Old fashion good men.

Unfortunately, it is that time in my life when i will continue to lose friends until i join them. i remember a poem i wrote about my parents after i visited them back home when they were in their nineties:

Waiting Grace

the old folks sit in the too warm room,
television images blink randomly,
the mute button silences the room
although they do not know as the hearing aids
lie on their respective tables with other
paraphernalia required for the elderly;
they sit knowing the time will come soon:
waiting grace.
Noble.
Sad.
All is right with the world.
they and the remaining few of their generation
know how to demonstrate
waiting grace.
no threat, no fret, no fear
shows in their continence:
they do what they can and
what they can decreases perceptively daily,
faculties fade and with the fading,
the joys of their industry escaping slowly:
waiting grace.
they have endured the test of time when
times were harder and
simpler and
they hold to those codes of right and
simplicity and
goodness to the neighbor, friend and
to service:
waiting grace.

i am there. There are a few more years of being me left. i don’t think i will live as long as my parents as i have lived a lot harder, wilder life than they did. But it’s here, man. It’s here. i just hope i can achieve their waiting grace.

And then last night as i grilled our steak on the grill outside our kitchen, i looked down the side yard. Some bird had brought seeds to his eating place sometime. In the middle of the blooming Lily of the Nile were flowering irises, the state flower of Tennessee.

There is beauty and peace in the world. We just have to look for it.

Rest in peace, my good friends John and Spud. You have earned it.

The getaway. The first one. Suitable for the first one.

An escape.

And if Maureen and i have a great escape destination, it’s north of the Southwest corner a tad under 600 miles. When i consider all the options and all that could be, i wish everyone had good people at an escape destination like we do.

The rest of the lyrics don’t exactly apply, but the opening? Yup. Nailed it:

Pack up all my cares and woe, here I go, singing low,
Bye-bye Blackbird.

And off we go…er, went. Now, the places we went were beyond terrific, but the people to whom we visited are off the charts.

Alan and Maren Hicks met us at the San Francisco airport. We drove to the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park and lunched there. Great lunch, outside. Then we went to the  Calder- Picasso exhibit at the museum. Maren is a source of endless knowledge and appreciation about art. Maureen loves art of all kinds and, although knowledgeable herself always learns from Maren. Alan can hold his own in his appreciation of art. i am learning. Love it and this exhibition gave me an insight and respect for what modern art, sculpture, and in Calder’s work, mobiles, are expressing.

Ahh, but then Sonoma. Sonoma is a place that used to exist and somehow still does. Growth with taste, genteel elegance that makes us feel comfortable. About every two hours or so, i marvel at how simpatico Maren Hicks and Maureen Boggs Jewell are. Their backgrounds are different. They come from different places, Atlanta and San Diego, yet they appreciate the good things, especially in art, decor, and food, dining out or cooking at home. Just being around them gives me a sense of all’s right with the world.

Alan? We have a coterie of buddies, nearly all of us from the same Vanderbilt fraternity and one or two others who have run with us from then until now. The big common interest is Vanderbilt athletics. Alan and i watched Vandy baseball all weekend, along with the Giants, and an old guy winning the PGA like no one has seen before. i’ve was fortunate to reconnect with Alan about 15 years ago, and we see each other on a regular basis, even though that almost 600 miles apart. Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in Golden Gate Park every October and almost every Vandy baseball early season trip out west. That’s not all: anytime i can make an excuse to get together.

And Sonoma, great museums, great walking, an epicurean delight, incredible weather, and…oh yes, wine, wine, wine. Not to mention the view from the backyard of the Hick’s abode looking east with the Sebastiani vineyards in the foreground where we walked in a light mist. And before the others are awake, i walk out in the brisk morning air with my cup of coffee to this:

Then there are places nearby. i could spend a bunch of days just walking around Jack London’s Valley of the Moon. We didn’t go there this time, but we did drive around in incredible vistas, feeling like we had connected with the earth goddess, and i assured myself Marlon Brando’s character Rio in “One eyed Jacks” did his riding around these amber colored hills. We made it to  The Murphy Store, a rambling shack-like structure hanging out over Tomales Bay, and had raw oysters, oyster Rockefeller, a rock cod sandwich and, to conclude, buffalo milk ice cream. Folks, it just don’t get much better than that.

And then Saturday, we received a bonus. A tornado watch, if you can believe that, in the Denver, affected the flight that would send us winging back to the Southwest corner. All was uncertain, so we changed the flight (at no expense to us: thank you, Southwest) to Sunday morning. Voila. We got another night in our little slice of almost heaven.

Thanks, Alan and Maren, for yet another wonderful getaway. After this past year, it was much needed.

Now the big journey is coming up. Home sweet, home. Signal Mountain with family. Hotlanta. And Asheville.

Catching up.

i thank my brother and sister in helping me remember his fishing buddies.

Sometimes i wonder why i thought it was really a great thing. 

I have always wondered why my father did it. He did it from the time i could remember, and i learned he had done it pretty much all of his adult life.

His last shot at it was after he turned 93. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do it anymore. There was no longer anyone who would go with him, and he didn’t want to be away from my mother, who was in poor health in her later years.

Even now, i would like to do the kind of fishing we did mostly, perhaps not on his scale, and i would have to find time to do it. It’s also different here in the Southwest corner compared to back home.

He did some deep sea fishing with his brother-in-law, Uncle Bill Prichard (whose wife often said i looked just like him) out of Florida, but not a whole lot. i don’t think he did a lot, if any, fly fishing.  — Except for some great four or five summers with Henry Harding, i haven’t flyfished. But driving out to Barton’s Creek on Franklin Road, parking our car by the bridge, wading in our swimsuits and old sneakers with small rope stringers tied to the back of our swimsuits, wading through the creek shallows both north and south, casting and sometimes, sometimes catching a bream or sunfish remains one of my greater joys and the source of great stories Henry and i share still — But Jimmy Jewell  fished off of docks and banks and an untold number of boats he owned including the wooden speed boat he and Uncle George Martin built, which then sunk on its test run somewhere west of Ramsey’s boat dock on the Cumberland River back in the late forties. There was one time (i’m not sure how many times he did it) in February of sixty-eight after i was commissioned and on my way to Key West for Anti-Submarine Officer School where i fished with other ensigns in various training programs each Sunday when we would leave early, board Morale Welfare, and Recreations, converted harbor patrol craft and fish for grouper and barracuda fairly successfully while eating geedunk sandwiches made with fresh Cuban bread we picked up at a bakery before leaving and drinking copious amount of beer out of one of the two huge ice boxes, the other of which was reserved for the catch, and have a barbecue that night with more beer. But back to that February, Daddy, Uncle Snooks, and i drove over to Pickwick Dam one afternoon in about three hours, stayed in an unheated cabin overnight, to get up, put the boat in the water, and fished for sauger until the snow was getting too thick to see, and i still remember it as one of the coldest times in my life (along with standing in and out of Pusan, Korea harbor in January and February, 1979, and playing golf at San Francisco’s Harding Park in July, 1975).

Then there was that August when he and i went catfish fishing below the dam at Center Hill. It was about 95 degrees and 95 percent humidity, de rigueur for Tennessee Augusts back then. We bought about six pints of shad guts for bait. Daddy had his usual supply of sardines, Vienna sausages, and saltine crackers. It was hot. He typically sweated but not as much as me. He caught about half-dozen good sized catfish, i caught two, one of which finned me as i was taking out the hook and dropped the catfish back in the water. And it was hot and i began to wipe the sweat crawling down my face with my hands and then bait the hook with those ultra-foul smelling shad guts and then eat a sardine or a Vienna sausage with a saltine and smelled like something from worse than the stockyards for three or more days and it was fun and don’t ask me why and then something hit my line and i set the hook and pulled and then whatever it was, a big catfish we think, just began swimming away taking my line with it slowly, methodically, moving steadfastly unwinding my reel ignoring my efforts to stop it and the line was about half gone from the reel when finally my father cut the line. Must have been one hell of a big catfish.

He fished for crappie, even small mouth and large mouth bass, and pretty much anything that would bite on a TVA lake.

Of course, i was never as good as he was. But i tried.

I understand one of my favorite kinds of fishing is no longer available back home. Someone told me the striped bass they stocked in the TVA lakes are all gone. Sad.

I remember fishing for them with my father.

Sometimes we would trawl for them with white shad lures trailing behind the fourteen-foot Aluma-Craft with the Johnson twenty-five horsepower outboard motor running as low as possible. We often took the boat out to the river from about a mile up Barton’s Creek into the channel where Old Hickory Lake has just about transmorphed into the Cumberland River again. Before fishing sonars, we used as we blindly searched for a school of the striped bass although he was a magician at finding them so perhaps “blindly” is not an accurate description. If we found them, we would catch five or six on a run, turn 180 and trawl back over the ground to catch more. But we never really caught a great load. i think the largest number was around ten or so. Of course, he caught most of them.

What i remember most though was his night fishing for those striped bass, mind you.

i think his children got to go along with him occasionally. i know i did frequently. But he had scores of fishing buddies over the years: Lum Edwards, Glenn Bishop, Herbert Tomlinson, Harry Martin, Sergeant Major Richards from Castle Heights, my cousin Maxwell Martin, my uncle Snooks Hall, and occasionally Henry would go with us. The stories are of legend and many.

He, with whomever was going with him, would load up after supper and head to Center Hill Lake, most likely the Sligo Boat Dock. He would put about a half-dozen to a dozen minnows in the bait bucket and go to one of his favorite holes: he knew all of the lakes like he knew the back of his hand. Once he determined which deep hole was best, he anchored with an old window weight or two tied to a rope for the anchor. A couple of Coleman kerosine lanterns with a shield toward the boat would be hung over the side. Mind you, he didn’t go with a full moon and preferred cloudy nights. The darker it was, the more effective was the light from the lanterns to draw the shad minnows. He would use a seine to catch more shad for the bait bucket. He, himself, would put two or three rods and reels leaning over the side and lowering the weighted lines to what he estimated was the bottom of the shad pool attracted to the lantern light. That was where the striped bass would hit. And they ran in big schools. He quite frequently came home in the early morning with over a hundred striped bass, usually in the three-pound range, sometimes bigger.

And what happened next?

Well, he didn’t like to eat fish. So he would clean and dress the fish, roll them up in newspaper and give them to family, neighbors, and friends. Then he would eat breakfast and go to work. Often he would repeat this two or three times a week during the warmer months, sometimes even back to back.

He loved it. So did i.

This was begun last Thursday. Then it got crazy as it seems to do more than it should.

Since i started this, i made a quick decision to go to the desert to spend much too not enough time with one of my best all-time friends, Frank Kerrigan, who once kept my sanity and is the godfather of daughter Sarah.

It was a three-hour drive over the mountains, the back way because even though those GPS wonders say it’s faster, i avoid freeways when possible, and therefore wound around the switchbacks up to about 5,000 feet and down again, stopping at the junction of CA 371 and CA 74 for a Gaucho Special Omelette composed of scrambled eggs with Chorizo and jalapeños, topped with tomatillo sauce, sour cream, and homemade salsa along with a Green Flash IPA breakfast beer at the Paradise Valley Cafe, which Pistol Annie, so named because she toted two six guns on her hips for years during her ownership, from 1939 until  sometime in the 50’s or 60’s still carrying those six guns on her hips.

Arriving in the 100 degree dry heat of the desert,  Frank and i played a round at the Plantation, an incredible golf course only for totally politically incorrect men, where i gave out after 16 holes and picked up after the 432nd bunker shot and sat on the veranda waiting for Frank, who was waiting for me on the other side of the clubhouse, and i looked down the eighteenth fairway and beyond the first tee and thought of it being around 75 degrees with a breeze in the shade on the pristine world of golf, and just maybe, just maybe, like the guy in the bar on my first time there about fifteen years ago, who sat in one of the five leather recliners facing a bank of six televisions with different sports events and he, with a beer in each hand turning to me and declaring, “I ain’t going  home.” And Frank and i went to the Hideaway course to shower and have dinner on another veranda with a wedding and reception going on and then we returned to talk until the we hours solving most of the problems of the world and one or two of our own before the rack, awaking, saying goodbyes before Frank headed back to his beloved Lake Michigan and i reversed the ride up and down the mountain to get home for a late afternoon supper at our place for special events, this time for Mother’s Day with Maureen and Sarah, which was damn near perfect. And i got home, one very tired old puppy, and all was well.

Today was recovery day, getting my act together until tonight i remembered i started this when i sat outside again and, hopefully, will finish this sometime today.

And so it began:

Old men ruminate.

This afternoon was ’bout perfect for this old man to ruminate.

It was a day of doing things to fix up the house. i finished with a run to pick up the pork butt for Maureen’s carnitas tacos. When i got back, i decided to take it easy. After all, the Padres were off tonight, and i will go to bed a bit earlier to be ready for our early FMG: Friday Morning Golf.

After all, i do live in the Southwest corner, which i again related to my close friends, Alan and Maren Hicks, this afternoon that most places in the world have more 10’s (on a scale of 0-10) than San Diego, because it’s relative. But no place on earth has more 7’s, 8’s, and 9’s than the Southwest corner and except for two wildfires (one of which scared us but never really came close) back in 2004 and 2007 i’ve never seen anything 6 or below.

And it’s May. Right? The week after the Kentucky Derby. i mixed a gin and tonic and went out in the backyard to relax and enjoy.

i chose the upraised area we have dubbed the “sitting area” rather than under our new trellis on the patio, which i had used several days earlier to work, not relax. We wished to retain the sunlight in our living room and dining room and were reluctant to cover that patio, but with the new sliding doors and a sunshade rather than a solid roof, it has become one of favorite places:

And last Thursday, i did, relax, enjoy that is. i discarded all of the negatives to which i am exposed on a continuing basis, wondering why for just a moment and remembering Mose Allison explaining “everybody’s crying mercy when they don’t know the meaning of the word” and “everybody’s crying justice just as long as they get theirs first” and “everybody’s crying peace on earth just as soon as we win this war,” and i know Miles got it right and i just need to let it go. And i do and know i am a lucky man.

i also wondered how i ended up with a woman with immaculate taste and a designer of a great landscape. i looked around to see what she, our rather spectacular Brit gardener, Paul Shipley, my father, old time friend Peter Schurek (with whom i’ve lost touch), all under Maureen’s guidance, and just a bit of a few things i’ve done.

From my vantage i looked up at my flag. It has become a neighborhood delight. Unlike all of the brazen disrespect for the flag have adopted to scream for their causes, this one is always in keeping with the U.S. Flag regulations. Respect for the constitution for which it stands; you know:  others Like there is this hill, this slope, that was lovely with the development men’s short term fix when we bought thirty-one years ago but quickly overtaken by the acacia they had added, and the acacia, unknown to many and certainly to us until we learned the acacia bark is a treat for tree rats and the tree rats are a treat for the Southwestern rattler and we soon had a sizable population of all three, two of which would often leave this paradise of the food chain to visit our yard proper and one, the tree rats finding the way into our attic, and all was not fun until we cleared the slope from all things, especially the acacia and the other two have become sparse and all was good until the rains came and turned the top layers of dirt to mud, which in turned slid down the slope to park up against the fence, which is when we started the project displayed here and the areas with the bougainvillea and the multi-colored blooms of the ice plant are already starting to spread…and of course, we will find other problems with this fix-it plan i’m sure.

But now, it’s enjoy time.

i will never be able to adequately explain to my friends back home why we remain in the Southwest corner.  As i walked around our backyard, i decided to provide some photos of a a part of our reason why,

There are the two side yards:

And then there is the all-year blooming salvia that allows the hummingbirds to greet us at breakfast every morning. Oh, we are not rich. We would like to travel more and have some trips planned, and there are some things we would do for our home if we had a bit more money. But in the scheme of things, we have enough, and i can be just fine, right here, for as long as i am going to be around. I’m not grousing. No, sir.

i just keep trying to make my friends back home why i choose to keep my home in the Southwest corner and not return to where i was born:

My manuscript for the book is all but ready to go to the editor. Maureen and Sarah are doing a line edit to correct my grammar and silly mistakes, not to mention give me some good advice about content.

i am essentially done until Jennifer McCord, a rather remarkable more-than-an-editor receives the next version. It’s sort of like being in a vacuum. Lots of time to do things needing doing. It’s a strange feeling. So what do i do? Write. i’ve got several writings in the works. This is one.

i wish all of you could have been with me and Maureen on the Orange Avenue sidewalk outside Saiko Sushi in Coronado. It was a nice early evening.

It was early for supper as was now their custom: wait for the commuter traffic to die down, avoid the later crowds, and get them home at a decent hour because both went to bed earlier than when this whole thing began near forty years ago. 

He mused as the two of them sat at the sushi diner, al fresco before sunset, in the strange combination as David Brooks would call it of “BoBo”(“BOhemian BOurgeois) on this island in the middle of the city in the Southwest corner in the late afternoon. The diner’s name struck him as a marketing double entendre: Saiko Sushi, or Psycho Sushi, which he thought was the actual name for quite a while.

She sat opposite him where she could look out on the green expanse where the original ferry landing was before they built the bridge.

He decided to try the old fashion, a strange headline cocktail at a Japanese restaurant. 

He considered himself a sort of country expert on old fashions after he learned from a stout, friendly young woman who was the bartender at a kiosk in the lobby of a Seattle Hotel years and years ago. It was definitely not al fresco. He was the only one at the makeshift bar just down the lobby from the hotel’s signature bar and restaurant where a large crowd of guests were obviously having a good time. After a long day of briefing a Coast Guard ship on their role in a Navy amphibious exercise, he didn’t need that. Just a drink, order in, and rest, maybe a baseball game on television, and sleep. The kiosk bar seemed just right to get through the first requirement. He asked what do you recommend. 

“How about an old fashion?” she asked.

“Sounds good,” he nodded.

The he watched as she muddled the powdered sugar, quarter slice of orange and maraschino cherry in a dash of water, how she added the bourbon (lord, oh lord, please, please, please, as one Mister James Brown once intoned, don’t use high end whiskey: that stuff is for neat and at the worst, on ice. Period). She splashed on the angostura bitters, added the ice, and, he thought, it was perfect. 

And he remembered the father of the woman across the table from him on the sidewalk in this pre-sunset twilight. He had taken Ray home with him after a round of golf, asked him if had watched “The Party” and described it. Ray was skeptical but agreed to watch. He asked Ray if he would like an old fashion. Ray was skeptical but agreed. Ray loved both. In fact, he raved about both. Ray’s enjoyment pleased his son-in-law.

All of this, of course, came back to the woman across from him at the boutique sushi diner. He marveled. His wife was beautiful. Several years ago, she had let her hair go natural. The white hair added to her beauty. 

Most of all, he marveled at how they fit. Neither was sure in the beginning. Then one night about the same time as this late afternoon dining, they had parked on the street near one of the open space canyons near the Kensington neighborhood and just talked as the sun set. It had been thirty-nine years since that talk.

He knew then, but he didn’t know. She was knock dead gorgeous back then, but it was just a man and a woman looking, and discovering each other.

He marveled that they had just kept discovering. Hadn’t stopped. He marveled how much they had grown together, how they learned from each other, how they enjoyed what they had learned together. He marveled at how they understood, argued with humor, and agreed to disagree.

She ordered the Saiko Sushi edamé. She loved it. He ate it. She was disappointed when the waitress told him they no longer pan seared the gyoza, and ordered the boiled version. His first taste of gyoza was at another Japanese restaurant thirty years earlier, steamed, he believed. He loved it. He wondered why he had never had it in Japan. He had eaten almost totally Japanese in his extended time in Sasebo back a couple of centuries ago it seemed. A young Japanese beautiful, tiny woman had taken him to dining most Americans never saw. His old commanding officer, Art Wright of the landing ship dock had taken him down to “Sake Town” in Sasebo, Japan, where they had gone to no fancy, just incredibly fresh sushi places. He had lots of things not offered in the U.S. version of Japanese cuisine, but never had gyoza.

Gyoza was another thing they discovered they both loved.

He wondered how many restaurants they had dined since they met. He wondered how they seem to always find something meaningful to talk about, before pausing and admitting to himself he could often get on a role and pontificate to beat the band until he realized that look she had when she was tired of his spiel. He had discovered he could read that body language and shut up.

But this night on the sidewalk at twilight with an opah roll in front of him, it all didn’t matter, at least not in the grand scheme of things, if there was such a thing. They were together. They connected. And they were still discovering.

And that old fashion was really good.