This is a story from a wonderful chef and lover of food, Ron. It is written as remembered from his telling.
For these past twenty years, I have never lived more than six months in one place. I did a lot of things, worked in restaurants as a dishwasher and everything else, and later I would help get new restaurants started. For awhile I worked as a truck driver for Subway. I will never eat there again. We would deliver whole trucks of meat that had expiration dates in two years. Meaning the meat on your sandwich could be two years old. Eat fresh? I would see that on the TV and cringe. After that I was a Greyhound bus driver for a long time. On one trip across the country this lady and I got to talking. She was a southern belle out of Savannah, and we talked the whole ten hours. We were getting close to the end of the line when she had been quiet for a few minutes. I looked over and saw such a look of consternation on her face.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m trying to figure out how to ask you out,” she said.
When the bus reached the end of its route we had a wonderful dinner together. Great conversation, great laughs, great moments. We were going different ways. We said goodbye.
Seven months later, I got off a Greyhound in LA. You’ll never believe this, but she was the first person I saw off the bus. Of all the places, of all the times. If these things are supposed to happen, they’ll happen. I walked right up to her and asked her if she wanted to get dinner. We had another perfect night together. Another perfect moment in time.
That’s not how Karen and I met, though.
We had both reached a point in our lives where we had entirely given up. We had both stopped looking, and resolved to live our lives alone. It was the last thing either of us were expecting. The short story? We went to tea. And then we each went home and thought ‘what the heck was that?’ And, we’re not monks. We’ve been together for a year and a half now. This year, while I was packing to come here to camp for the summer, she said “you can leave things here, you know,” and I did. I left a whole drawer. I’m going back to Santa Barbara, and after all these years being in one place and another, it’s finally a place that feels like home, you know?
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