The Taco Traveler

You were laying there on the beach but I didn’t see you until I stood up to leave. You were on your stomach, propped on your elbows, your hand to your mouth as you popped in another grape or something else that seemed to make eating really, really fun. You chewed politely, closed-mouthed, but there was something about your face that was smiling. Maybe you wrinkled the corners of your eyes.

At fifty feet away it would have been a lot of beach to cross, dragging my bike through the sand – to be completely wrong and embarrassed about whether or not you were looking at me, so I just packed up my backpack. I looked back once more as I was walking away and beneath your large sunglasses I still wasn't sure, so I rode away.

As I was riding down the boardwalk a barrage of quotes came into my head – quotes that can be tedious in the abstract but inspiring if there’s a specific application. There’s a good friend’s “How long ya gonna be dead?” Mark Twain’s “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed in the things you didn’t do than the ones you did do….” My stepfather’s “If I could change one thing about my life, I would have approached more women I was attracted to.” The magic moment – what finally made me turn around – was a stray volleyball that bounced onto the boardwalk from a game on the beach. It bounced from someone’s mishit high off a condo and back onto the boardwalk, and I adjusted my course to get under it on its second bounce. I palmed it with one hand and threw it back over my shoulder to the volleyball game in one motion. As a bike-riding, volleyball-handling ninja, it was my duty to turn around and talk to you.

You were looking at the water when I came back, and I surprised you a bit as I laid down my bike and crouched there next to you, but you listened to what I had to say.

“As I was leaving a few minutes ago,” I said, “a movie from the 80’s came into my head. Have you ever seen ‘About Last Night’? Rob Lowe, Demi Moore?”

You shook your head no.

“Well, there’s a scene early on, where Rob Lowe sees Demi across a bar. They exchange a couple looks and later he comes up to her and says ‘I noticed you noticing me.’ She says ‘There was a clock over your head.’ So… as I was getting up to leave before, was there a clock over my head?”

You laughed, understanding and appreciating the idea, the approach, but shook your head, a little embarrassed and not at all interested. You made a comment about having a boyfriend; you did just enough to be nice.

I told you to have a great day and shouldered my bike back to the boardwalk, continued past the volleyball game for the third time. No more quotes clanged in my head. No more stray message-bearing volleyballs came my way. But still, there was the satisfaction of having tried.

TT

There's not enough time to be brave and aggressive, sometimes. And when there's only a second, both of us flying around a bend in the bike path and a sudden smile of surprise attraction, it's even harder. For me, it was a smile that validated the quality of a movie - a happy ending in difficult times - the young carny + carny summertime fling that turns into more.

I'd smiled twice already on that bike ride back to my boat. There was the older man who'd warned me - before the movie in the theater lobby - about the amount of salt I was putting on my popcorn, his concern for my heart and health fatherly with a bit, maybe, of just wanting someone to talk to. And as I left the theater and started down San Diego's Broadway there he was again, crossing the street in front of the bus I'd stopped next to. I smiled again but he didn't see me as he was preoccupied with whether or not the bus was going to stop at the light or run him down.

A couple miles later I smiled and held up a "peace" sign to an old homeless man who was staring as I approached, my arms dangling lazily at my sides as I rode casually along the sea wall. He waved back, but with a bit of a smirk like "yeah, fella - you're gonna kill yourself or ride right into the bay like that."

And at the turn where a year and a half ago I would have turned, too, when I was berthed at Harbor Island instead of the America's Cup Harbor, you came around the bend and presented me with a split-second "do I smile" decision (yes) and then you were past and there was the "do I chase and ask her to coffee" decision (no, another day). You had short, light brown hair, a bit curly, sassy, bike-wind-tussled, and even in the short time I saw you I could see that your shy smile dimpled your cheeks in a perfect and beautiful way.

We passed, I stopped at the light and looked back and you were already around another corner and I was left with the regret of a moment good but gone. I started writing to you immediately, composing this, imprinting your look on my left brain so my right could share it later, or now.

I sit at my favorite Starbucks, near my marina. I locked my bike again next to the same two bikes that have been there since I returned to San Diego in January. The bikes never move. They are matching beach cruisers, inexpensive but new not too long ago, one red and one blue. The red has a mass of cobwebs connecting the rear brake to the rear tire and the blue has an open and empty tool kit. The girl working the Starbucks didn't know the story behind them, so I suggested a scenario: There's an old couple, both sick, in pain and incurable, who for Christmas bought each other the bikes for a last ride to their favorite Starbucks. They locked their bikes out of habit, then went inside and sat, held hands and watched each other across the table for that one last coffee. And after that coffee they walked up the street to the bridge and went out of this world together, the bikes a legacy of their act.

Real is what we make it. I choose to believe in good stories because they make me feel good. The couple in the movie will live together, he'll work himself through graduate school and she'll finish at NYU and they'll be happy. The older man at the theater will return home after his careful walk home and defend himself in a friendly and loving way saying "Yes, I had some popcorn but I didn't add any salt, dammit." The old homeless man, for a while tonight, will feel a little less invisible. And you... I guess I'd like to think that somehow I'll see you again.

I was leaving the salon as you arrived. You were walking from your car in the parking lot as I walked to mine, and even from a distance, from across the lot, I knew there was something amazing about the moment we were walking into. It was obvious you were gorgeous, but as we approached each other it wasn’t your being generally beautiful that drew me; it was your smile. Our eyes locked, we smiled, we passed, and though you were gone I couldn’t stop smiling.

This was 1997 or '98, when the Internet was just beginning to explode and I worked as a developer writing code for a news site. I worked hard, but I'd also take an occasional day off to go fishing or sailing or snowboarding. I drove a cool red Jeep. I was 30 and single and for the first time in my life I had extra money. Occasionally I'd spend a hundred bucks on a massage and a hair cut at a nice downtown salon, and if the stars aligned (which they did exactly once), I'd share a smile with a beautiful girl in the parking lot.

After we saw each other, I was a mess. For the next half hour I couldn't get your smile out of my head. I went next to an appointment just down the street to give blood, and I even told the nurse about you and how I regretted not saying something or stopping, forgetting my blood-donating appointment altogether to ask you to put off your hair appointment for a drink or a cup of coffee. And the nurse said, "She's probably still there, right?" Yes, girl hair takes a long time, I remembered.

I'm blessed with huge veins for ease of blood-giving and a slow-beating but large and efficient heart. The greenest lab tech in the world can find the vein in my left arm and have a pint of my blood in about eight minutes, poke-to-cookie. In this case, I may have squeezed the ball extra hard to fill the bag in five. I got that blood out and wolfed down my cookie and glass of juice and was out the door before considering how little I'd eaten that day. But the situation called for an immediate gesture, and once the idea got into my head....

I sped to a grocery store that had a good floral department and had the girl arrange a spring bouquet, orchid-heavy, while I wrote. What did I say on the card? I have no idea. I suppose I would have said:

Can't get your incredible smile out of my head. I hope you'll call.

And my name and number.

As I was writing the card I got dizzy and hot. I almost passed out from lack of blood, lack of food, dehydration and a rush of whatever other chemicals your smile had put into my system. The flower girl saw I'd turned white and had me sit on an upside-down bucket in the walk-in refrigerator for a few minutes to cool off, to get my head together. She and the manager brought me some water and asked me to stay longer, to be sure I was okay before driving, but I didn't want to miss you.

When I walked into the salon again, still a little dizzy, carrying the flowers, I think you were sitting there at the other end of the place but I didn't know for sure, your hair in curlers or foil or something amongst five other girls in curlers or foil who also could have been you. You told me later on the phone that your heart skipped when I walked in. You thought I was bringing the flowers for someone else. You said to your stylist: "I wish those were for me." I didn't want to look right at you, didn't want to give myself away or risk smiling again at the wrong girl. I made a quiet attempt to describe you to the girls at the front desk. I remember their blushes, their knowing, conspiratorial smiles when they knew for sure who you were.

I wish I hadn't been so eager to know you better. I wish I hadn't known so much about the Internet. That night, after our nice talk on the phone, the short but perfect conversation of two people who don't know each other but are willing to learn, I wanted to write you. I searched for your company, saw how they formatted their email addresses and guessed yours. I sent you a short note. Just a Hi, is this you? Looking forward to seeing you again. To you, this was invasive, creepy. Maybe it was; I was still a little off and lacking blood - the donated pint having been previously assigned to my brain. Your reply questioned how I'd gotten your email address, as if I'd hired a detective or something. And in the end you said you were getting back together with your ex boyfriend anyway.

I think about you often, or at least sometimes a vague idea of you floats in and back out of my head, and I don't think I'll completely forget you or that day. Not just because I learned you can only push a romantic notion so far before it's creepy, but because you represent what I think is greatest about being single: the opportunity for spontaneous infatuation, and having fun with life and maybe even the prospect of finding love. More than anything, though, you're a reminder of what a beautiful smile can do.

I was stranded, waiting for better weather to cross the bar and make my way south around Cape Mendocino. Tired of my canned Costco boat food, I somehow found my way to Hurricane Kate's ("Dining with a twist") in downtown Eureka. It was an amazing lunch, and I was so immersed in my sweet potato fritters that I almost didn't notice you come in, but the host and the chef made a show of welcoming you at the door, like they knew you well, saw you often. You may have been a starlet in the fifties, and even at seventy, eighty, you carried yourself like a princess in the best sense of the simile - the Grace Kelly / Diana sense.

Your hair was mostly white. You wore expensive gray pants and against the backdrop of a black turtleneck you wore delicate and sensible lunchtime pearls. The host seemed to ask you with a look of concern: "Where is ... today?" and you smiled sweetly, looked down a bit. You might have suggested that he was under the weather. But somewhere behind your smile there was a bit of sadness, like his weather was somehow, brutally, more permanent. I couldn't help thinking of a story from several years ago on This American Life: a couple is together for over fifty years, and when she dies he follows, naturally, the next day, exactly as he said he would. It's hard to believe, sometimes, that sort of love exists.

The host seated you alone at a table by the window, and for several minutes I just watched you. You stared out the window as if you were waiting, and I wanted to join you or ask you to join me, to listen if you wanted to talk, even if not about him but about anything. I was sure you had stories to tell.

In the end, after all, you were joined by someone who must have been your daughter, and I stopped thinking about you as much and started considering what it would be like to be so loved, so taken care of, so fussed about before you dressed and reluctantly left my bedside to meet our daughter for lunch. And even if I only conjured him, creating the backstory of his sickness and inferring your concern, to be able to imagine the accomplishment of something like your love was well worth the walk from the marina and the price of a long, thoughtful lunch.

You were doing homework, taking up most of a small table at the café, and I hated to disturb you, but my stepfather’s story was too fresh. I had to do something because you looked like the girl my sisters dreamt up for me: you’re comfortable with yourself, slim, pretty, smart, and you looked like you could sit on a sofa in a high-rise metropolitan apartment, reading a book, feet tucked up underneath you, wearing glasses, engaged by your book despite the lights beyond the windows painting a city.

This must have been 1996 because “Long December” had been playing in my head. And the most amazing lyric I’d ever heard, stunningly beautiful not for its own words but for what it evokes, had to do with the way that light attaches to a girl. And there you were. At Starbucks, early morning with the early morning light attaching to you, and for some reason I was not only awake that early, which was odd, but I was also out of the house, at a Starbucks, sitting four or five tables away, writing in my journal and also browsing a book I’d just bought at the bookstore next door.
After gathering my things and scribbling my number on a piece of paper I forced myself to stand up and walk to your table. “Hi,” I said. “Can I bother you for a minute?”

You smiled yes.

“Can I tell you a story?”

I gathered from the look on your face that you hadn’t heard that one before.

“Just a few nights ago, Thanksgiving night, my stepfather said something that made me come over here. We were talking after dinner, the whole family, all drinking wine and reminiscing about the cool and crappy things that have happened in our lives, and he said: ‘If I could change one thing about my life, if I could do one thing differently that I didn’t do this time around, I’d approach more women I was attracted to.’”

“So that’s what I’m doing. I know you’re busy doing your homework or whatever all this is, so I don’t want to keep you, but I saw you sitting here and thought you looked great, and I just needed to let you know.”

You looked like you wanted to talk more. My story had more than its intended effect; it opened a door that I wasn’t prepared to walk through and you may have said something inviting more conversation, but I panicked and flushed, maybe put down the slip of paper with my name and phone number, answered your question quickly, smiled and walked away.

You never called. I probably should have prepared myself for more conversation and stayed, summoned some wit instead of relying on a sort of prepared script and then bolting. But the goal isn’t always to move the relationship forward. Like skydiving, it’s not just about the freefall; even more, it’s about taking that first step out of the plane.

When I first saw you, I didn’t think you were my type. I was still ten rows away and saw you aggressively cram something into the overhead, and then your friend crawled into the middle and you crashed into the aisle seat like you were already exhausted, though I’d learn later that you were just starting your trip. I smiled an apology as I got closer, letting you know I was coming for the window seat.

“That’s okay,” I said. I can jump over you.

You grinned, said: “I’d like to see that.”

I was quiet for most of the flight, resting my eyes and recovering from my trip which had started the day before in Guaymas, Mexico on a bus. But I overheard you talking about work. Finally, I said something: “Are you two going to Seattle on business? Sounds like you’re doctors?”

“No,” you said, “we’re E.R. nurses, but this is a girl’s weekend. How ‘bout you? Are you visiting Seattle or going home?”

“Ah, so you were totally prepared for me to break my leg jumping over your seat.”

“You would have been in good hands.”

“Well, visiting or going home. Uh….” When you’re essentially homeless, leaving your sailboat behind in Mexico as hurricane season approaches after having sailed for six months, and then hopping on a Mexican bus to Phoenix to get back to check on your staged but otherwise completely empty house and get some real work done at the office before heading to Florida where your kids live with their mom, it’s easy to make conversation but hard to say exactly where your roots lie.

“I’m a transient,” I said. “In the truest sense of the word.” You didn’t imagine me sleeping on a park bench so you wanted to know more. For the next hour we talked, you, your friend and I. I told you about sailing far from land, about whales and dolphins, about great restaurants and cheap gas in Mexico and just a very little bit about the friendliest divorce on record. You browsed my iPhone pictures and in the end we drank like I was joining you on your weekend.

The more we talked, the more I found myself wishing you’d be in Seattle longer than just the weekend. I noticed your skin, your eyes. I was blown away when you used “quixotic” in a sentence….

“What should we do in Seattle?” you asked. “What would you do?”

“Uh…. Hmm. Fly to Vegas?” I’m funny, I guess, with one hour’s sleep. And I loved to see you smile.

We talked about meeting somewhere. I suggested I’d never pass on a chance to go out with four beautiful girls, so we exchanged numbers.

But then we landed and you took out your phone, made a call and teased the person on the other end: “Yes,” you said. “Right, we’re back in Phoenix. It was a wonderful weekend! I’m so glad I went and I can’t wait to see you. Are you outside ready to pick us up?” You giggled and I’m sure he laughed, too.

I’ve seen it before, you women who manipulate science and warp the laws of the universe when it comes to the men in your life. I was married to a woman about whom I always said, because of the coworkers and friends and babies who continuously orbited such a small person: “Your gravity is out of proportion to your mass.” And there you were on the phone, like Einstein conducting a beam of light or ripping the fabric of time, somehow making a three hour flight feel like an instant to me, while the very same span was forever to someone at home who wasn’t with you.

It was a beautiful day for golf, but I was a bad, bad golfer. It had been too long since I last played, and I could come up with many more excuses if I really cared. Golf being what it is, though, there’s always something good that happens on the course to keep us coming back. Sometimes it’s that one great shot. Sometimes it’s an amazing view overlooking a lake. On this day it was both of those things, but mostly it was you.

Early in the round I’d bought a water, a beer and a candy bar from you, and you smiled and did your job as cart girl: look pretty, make the golfers comfortable, keep them hydrated and sell them just enough food so they still want to buy a burger at the turn or after the round. I didn’t think of you much after that, since I still was fairly focused on golf; I hadn’t yet begun to slide downhill to the point where I didn’t care where the ball went.

Late in the round, on the fifteenth or sixteenth hole, I’d mostly given up, and after hitting two tee shots into the canyon, I hopped out of my partner’s cart at the bottom of the hill to walk. Maybe it was to punish myself, or to just walk and try to relax a bit. And there you were. Smiling again, looking amazing, cute, happy in the sunshine and dressed like the middle of summer though it was still a chilly spring. I gave you a peace sign and immediately felt like a dork for giving a peace sign.

You stopped. “They left you,” you said, pouting for me.

“I didn’t feel like I deserved to ride with them anymore,” I answered, perturbed with my game but suddenly feeling better about the whole thing.

“Well, you can ride with me.” You patted the seat next to you.

“How far you going?,” I asked, hitchikerlike.

“Oh, just around. And around and around and around.” As you said this you rolled your head, and then we laughed at the perfection of our act, the synchronicity of our flirt.

I wanted to jump in, to take the rest of the round off, and in my hesitation I processed so many variables it was like poker and you’d just raised my decent hand. I considered whether you’d get in trouble, if you’d really meant it, how old you were. I did this analysis, and then wondered whether or not there was a shot yet to come this round that could save me from selling my clubs. I pictured a perfect five iron as it arched across a ravine to land on the edge of the eighteenth green, and understood that it was more important that I give that shot life so I could return, someday, to this course to have another day like this, and to see you again, to have another moment with you and maybe make you, us, laugh.

“Thank you, “ I said, “I’m going to try to finish this round. But no matter how badly I play these next couple holes, you’ve just made my day.”

You blushed and smiled the satisfied smile of a job well done, and you drove off proudly in your refreshment cart towards the next group, where someone else, from the sounds of it, may have been having a pretty rough day of golf.

“Truly,” you said. “I hope to see you again. Truly.” I can’t remember the last time I’d heard that word, let alone in that context. But there, in that context, it was beautiful. When you sat down at the poker table, I didn’t know what to expect; I was wary of you, maybe a little afraid. You didn’t remember this, but a week before we had played at the same table together, and that time you didn’t like me very much. You were losing money and I was one of the people taking it, and you didn’t like how quiet I was about it. I was the dull, quiet guy at the other end of the table who did nothing but take your money, and a couple times you even glared.

But when you sat down next to me this time, in a chair to my left where the drunk and over-talkative WSU alumnus had just left, angry and much less talkative when all of his money was gone, you did all you could to engage me. And it worked. After one bad hand you said “I can’t lose all my money already! What am I going to do? Go home by myself and lay on the couch and watch TV?” You touched my hand.

Men like me, playing a low-limit poker game like that, are suckers for a pretty girl. Or maybe the limits don’t matter? I guess if you’re too worried about the money to be distracted by a beautiful girl, then you’re playing above your level. Once, I played in a tournament and sat next to a beautiful Asian girl, and she didn’t need to say a word. I was completely lost at that table because of her perfume. I remember it as one of the most perfect scents ever. But she took her advantage a step farther – to the candy from a baby level – by sitting far back in her chair and most of the time leaning far forward in very low riding jeans, wearing sexy panties that three or four of us in the area couldn’t help but see most of. Are those… ‘hunter orange’? Clearly, it was not an accident, but we were still all sad to see her go when she was busted out of the tournament by someone at the other end of the table, some guy, apparently, with immunity. I’m pretty sure we knocked him out next.

Is it just a subtle part of the whole poker experience? Use everything at the table to your advantage, including the fact that you’re the only woman, and an attractive woman at that? I don’t care. It worked for you and it worked for me. Twice I laid down better hands because I wasn’t ready for you to leave. In return, you raked in a pile of someone else’s chips (and some of mine) and with a happy, satisfied look you said “Congratulations. That pot just bought you another twenty minutes of me time.”

In the end, when I got tired and it was time to go, I wasn’t ready to leave you. I said quietly, so nobody else would hear, “I need some food. Would you like to get a late-night snack? Is Burgermaster still open?” You didn’t hear the first part. You just checked your watch and wondered aloud whether or not the place was open, but for my sake only; you didn’t look like you were ready to go. I didn’t push the idea just in case you had heard but were ignoring it. “It was nice playing with you,” I said. “Take care.”

“It was nice playing with you, too,” you said. I smiled and started to walk away, but then you looked over your shoulder and said, “I hope to see you again,” and quietly, so only I could hear or maybe only to yourself, “Truly.”

I arrived just before kickoff to a house full of people I didn’t know, and when I saw you in the driveway it was immediately obvious you were the star – that there was something about your orbit that made people want to be in it. Your moon was little M_ - so happy, giggling and smiling, cupcake-frosting-nosed. Even when pouting she couldn’t hide how happy she was – how good her life is and how satisfied you make her.

You were the most beautiful person in a house full of beautiful people, and after we’d met and talked just a bit I couldn’t wait for the next time. A bit later I met another girl who introduced herself as a muse, and after exploring the idea a bit – asking whether she inspired anyone or any genre in particular, had she maybe had a screenplay written for her – I said, just to be funny, that I was off to write some poetry. And I found myself just minutes later having another perfect conversation with you as your daughter slept in your lap.

Sure, I romanticize moments. I remember as best I can but then sometimes knowingly take the events and the contexts and recreate, re-engineer feelings to create potential. Today, though, I didn’t need to do that; there was nothing I would have done differently or said differently. There wasn’t anything to gain, romantically. You had someone, M_’s father, waiting at home for you both, so today I was just a sailor and under-employed software architect having a good conversation with a beautiful and fascinating girl. And for me, having not actually acknowledged or celebrated the new year when it came, offshore somewhere on my way north from Cabo, something like that is enough to build a year upon.