A Tuesday Afternoon at Al's

So, I celebrated my 56th birthday yesterday. As I have done for the last several years, I decided to treat the day as a holiday on par with President’s Day, Memorial Day, etc which deserves the recognition of not working. I leisurely wander around the city, eating at old haunts built up over the decades of being a gourmand of Chicago street food. I indulged further with a lovely relaxing two hour massage before I met up with a friend for dinner.

The highlight yesterday, however, was a chance encounter with a stranger at Al’s #1 Italian Beef, the original Taylor Street location. The standard is to eat standing over a narrow metal counter, slightly bent over so that the au jus does not drip onto your clothes, even more important in the days when I would stop in from work wearing my tie. Al’s has given into a degree of comfort now by offering stools at the counter. It’s still a relatively intense process though. The sandwich comes wrapped in layers of wax paper to hold in the juices and drippings with another bundle of paper for the just-greasy enough stash of fries. So all of this takes up a bit of space on our narrow counters.

This stranger-to-me and his friend asked if they could share the counter, which of course they could. I tried to make space for them, and we got into a discussion about the term elbow room. Briefly turning to the general healthiness, or not, of our food choices we turned to deciding who was older- turned out I was by several months. We talked about marriages, divorces, kids, trust, and 1972 Chevelle SS’s. We concluded that life was meant to be lived. We then went our separate ways without stopping to even ask the name of the other. It was a short but meaningful (at least to me) blip in our day.

After having dinner with my friend, whom I have known closely since Sophomore year of college some 35+ years ago, I went home and caught up on all the wishes from people who have been a part of my life from as early as elementary school or even earlier. Yet this morning, as I drove into work, listening to an audiobook “Life is Hard” about how life is not necessarily a narrative story but granular episodes, I thought fondly about this interaction at Al’s.

I really have led a charmed life. There are people who have been a part of my life forever and some who have been these blips. Last year, I took a trip around the world in part to celebrate a new job contract. The real memories from that trip, however, were the people I had met and actually planned the tour around. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when most of life occurred in the confines of our sanctuary homes, I joined an online world of singers, musicians, cosplayers, and just conversationalists called BIGO. I connected with people from all over the globe. So when travel was open again, I made this tour meeting several of these people. Some, we didn’t actually know the language of the other (BIGO translates chats), and I would end up in hours-long in-person conversations with my new friends in flashing screens of Google Translate. Yet, we still had genuine laughter together. Thinking of the “blips”, besides my friend at Al’s, I can fondly remember many interactions. In 2017, wandering through a park in Edinburgh, an older gentleman and I started with a conversation about the fickleness of Scottish weather and ended with a hug and a selfie.There was the 19 year-old in Norway paying his way through college by sharing the spare bed in his sailboat with me, who had brilliant dreams and plans for his future. The 20 year-old son and 19 year-old daughter of a foreign friend taking refuge with me during the first COVID Christmas, despite not knowing me prior to that at all. I now treat them like my second family. I remember, before the age of airline entertainment systems, I met a young woman my age sitting next to me in the flight from the US to India talking for hours, begging the seating agent at our stopover to ensure a seat together, and even a non-romantic but well-need exchange of neck rubs in those economy class seats. I never met my seatmate again after we split off once we reached India, but I still remember her. I have a very happy memory of an immigration officer in Heathrow Airport, who good-naturedly congratulated me on my weight loss as compared to my passport photo. There’s a person from Turkey who just started following my Instagram feed due to some random images from southwest Turkey I put up after my trip last fall. That random follow, has led me to multiple new literary discoveries through her intelligent and creative feed. If I wanted to, I could cringe and unfollow so many of my Facebook friends given their political tendencies, but I don’t think we should reduce people to one criteria- unless they themselves prefer that. I tend to reflect on the fun remembrances of our lives together when things were simpler. Heck, I even treasure both the good memories of my life with my former wife as well as the life moving forward with her as co-parents to two beautiful daughters.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that I truly appreciate all the people I have encountered in my life. It’s been colorful and enriching. Truly thinking of each person as a human being who has touched me, makes my life so much more enjoyable and worthy. As I started writing this, I was thinking of the metaphor of life as a collage. Really though, it is more like the colorful dots in a pointillist painting, like “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”. At close up, just a random dot. Looking on from the vantage of space and time, a masterpiece – but still in creation.