This breakfast place is packed. I’m supposed to be meeting a friend. He's nowhere in sight.
I wait ten minutes and my friend calls to say he’s canceling. If I had a nickel for every time he canceled, I could buy a Lincoln-Ford dealership.
The waitress says, “If you don’t mind eating with a stranger, I can seat you at a two-top now. Or you can wait forty more minutes.”
“I like strangers,” I say.
Right this way.
He’s an older man with hair like cotton. He wears two hearing aids, thick glasses, and tucked-in shirt.
He squints at me when I sit.
“Mister Dan?” yells my waitress. “Can this gentleman eat with you?”
He smiles. He didn’t hear a word she said. He adjusts his hearing aids and shouts, “HOW'S THAT?”
And so it goes.
He is half-deaf, but he tells me he enjoys his elderly hearing deficit.
“I can turn my hearing aids ALL the way down,” Mister Dan shouts, demonstrating. “And suddenly, I have peace and quiet.”
How about that.
His wife died two years ago. She was the quintessential woman. She took
care of him.
She cooked big breakfasts from scratch while he piddled. Then he'd piddle through lunchtime. And every night after supper, he piddled some more.
Then they'd play Gin Rummy.
“Started playing when our kids were in high school,” he says. “They’d stay out late, neither of us could sleep until they were home safe.”
The couple kept a scorecard going for thirty-some years. When she passed, Mister Dan was ahead fifty-nine points.
“If I’d known she was sick,” he said. “I woulda been letting her win. She probably woulda murdered me if I EVER intentionally lost.”
Her death nearly killed him. His house became a tomb. His kids live out of state.
What good is piddling when there’s nobody to piddle for?
One day, Mister Dan refused to suffer from loneliness any…