Randy Fitzgerald

If you ever start thinking the economic downswing is universal and hopeless, just go try to get into Olive Garden on a Saturday night.

Barb and I and my two siblings and their spouses had an hour-and-40-minute wait on a recent evening, and you might have thought that long a delay would have discouraged about two-thirds of the would-be diners but, no, the waiting area, and the bar area as well, were packed the whole time we were there.

Personally, I try not to wait anywhere for anything more than 30 minutes anymore, but the Saturday night deal was not my call.  It was my brother-in-law’s birthday, Olive Garden is his favorite restaurant, and they don’t have one in Charlottesville where he lives.  So wait we did. And wait some more.

The get-together was also the February sibling supper for my brother, sister and me, and our spouses. Sib Sup is a set-in-stone reunion for dinner the first Saturday of each month, started some years back when we realized that, although two of us live in Richmond and the other only 65 miles up the road, we had been seeing each other only a few times a year.

Our interaction had simply fallen victim to busy work schedules, the  kids’ activities when they were younger, and, I guess, inertia.  Back then, we were actually doing a better job of keeping up with friends than with family. It’s just that you assume  your family will always be there when you get around to them, but your friends you might have to pay more attention to.  All that changed when my sister-in-law suggested sib sups.

Anyway, the other Saturday night at Olive Garden the Fitzgerald “family” grew remarkably larger in the space of an hour and forty minutes.  As our party of six moved around among the crush of the waiting crowd, we found ourselves near some chairs where sat a young woman who immediately got up and offered her place to us older folks. She said she was holding the seat for her father, who had not yet arrived, but one of us could sit there until he showed up.

We started to chat and quickly found out that she and her party were Fitzgeralds, too, though not from the same part of the country that my Fitzgeralds hailed from. Coincidently, her name was Beth Fitzgerald (my mother’s name) and her party was there to celebrate a birthday too—Beth’s mother’s birthday. My crazy brother Terry kept taking Mrs. Fitzgerald’s nicely wrapped birthday presents off the table and presenting them to my brother-in-law, the birthday boy in our party.

When Beth’s father arrived, he turned out to be a great guy—the owner of a local oil supply company. He had a few more years on him than I do, but as a man who really enjoys his work, he was committed to keeping at it for as long as he could. Retirement was not in his vocabulary, he said. “Why would I ever want to retire as long as I’m having a good time at work?” he asked me.  Why indeed.

I’m thinking about that. Maybe a lot of us retire just because we think we’re supposed to, and maybe this bum economy will keep more of us who have a job on the job long enough to take a second look at automatic retirement. And with this financial crisis, none of us may be able to afford to retire anyway.

By the time our table was called, all the Fitzgeralds were starting to feel a little like kin, or at least old friends.  We had exchanged so much information that we felt well acquainted, and the wait time at the restaurant had flown by.

A postscript: During dinner that night, I was telling my sister about another encounter Barb and I had once had as we waited for a restaurant table. The background on the story is that in 1969 I had taken a job teaching English at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. I soon learned that I was the replacement for a young man who, despite his Ph.D. and years of training, had decided to give up college teaching and go into carpentry.  No one knew where he had gone to pursue his new career—he was apparently quite an adventurer, a favorite with the Charleston students.

Cut to 1972 when Barb and I went to London to live for awhile. One day we decided to visit the part of town where poet John Keats had lived, stopping in at a busy pub near the underground station for a quick quaff. As we waited, we started to chat with the chap standing in front of us, and guess who?  Yes, it was my predecessor at Charleston, now happily making cabinets at Hampstead Heath in London. What an afternoon of conversation we shared!

I think life shows us, now and then, that having to wait in line can sometimes be a happy circumstance. You just have to take the time to find out who’s waiting along with you.