A nice chat

2026-05-02

"I actually miss the times before cellphones, when you'd go to a bar and talk to people around you!"

That's what I told John tonight, when he asked me if he was bothering me. We were both by ourselves, sitting at the bar. I had asked the bartender if the veggie burger was vegan — he heard the question, sitting next to me, and asked if I was vegetarian.

"Vegan", I said.

"My wife has been a vegetarian for 10-12 years", he told me.

He told me she's in the hospital. A cancer in her spine. She had chemo, radiotherapy, and a stem cell transplant recently. Now she had to be isolated for 3 weeks, since her immune system is recovering. The hospital only had a single vegetarian option for her, the same every day, and he couldn't bring her food from work because it was too risky.

We talked about RVs. I'm selling my class A. He had a class A, then a class C, then a boat, then a trailer. "We prefer camping, even though we now live by a lake. I hope to go camping with my wife again soon".

We talked about cruises. He goes on them a lot. I've never been on a vacation cruise, but I told him about all the scientific cruises I've been to: the routine and the day-to-day where you don't know what time you'll have to work. You arrive at a station at 2am, that's when the work starts.

He told me how he proposed to his wife ~30 years ago. A fancy restaurant, a poem in the menu, a bouquet of flowers with the ring in the middle. He told me about his kids and grandkids, the youngest just a couple of weeks old.

It took us 1 hour to find out we're both software engineers.

https://robida.net/static/media/2026/05/02/cf03083b-fcc0-4d65-ad8a-acdaacf45ff4.jpeg

#photo

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