In a matter of seconds, she had gotten up and walked right over to me. Now pulling her yellow jacket on completely and standing before me, she bent over a bit to look me right in the face. She was an old white woman in her late 60s maybe, tall, slim and with just the best British accent and Anglophile could hope for. She looked at me with an unexpected and non-invasive gentleness and told me that I reminded her of a school mate she knew in London about fifty years ago, a woman from Nigeria who she said was very beautiful and whom she had lost touch with and never seen again. She said that looking at me was like seeing her again fifty years back in time. I was so touched that I could barely do anything but just look at her and that yellow jacket beaming at me. I asked her how the woman’s name was spelled and she told me. I know how it feels to be thinking of someone that you have no way of reaching or of even knowing if they are still around or not. I could tell she really loved this woman. She said she just wanted to tell me that and when I found my voice I said something or other I can’t remember, something in the way of thanking her for the compliment. When the man, who I imagine was her husband, came back, it was like watching this perfectly coupled unit. All of their movements together, her helping him with his coat, them puttering around looking for her umbrella which Fran and I spotted under a table next to theirs had clearly been done countless times.But never before at Arielle’s while Fran and I looked on, as it drizzled lightly out on the street in Rhinebeck.
