One of the best things about that slow time between lunch and dinner us that the waiter has time to talk to the customers.

We were down at our favorite Denny’s. When we drive down from the Bay Area to Altadena, or up from Altadena to the Bay Area, this is a natural stopping place.

More times than not we get off the I-5 at Kettleman City, park, and go in for another very good and refreshingly affordable meal.

The waiter this time was Diego again.

We remember him vividly. He may have remembered us. He certainly does now.

We talked. At the table. At the cash register. There was no line waiting, so we had time to let one thought follow another.

We all shook hands three times. In my case, four. I held up my hand and turned it around for the whole restaurant to see and said not loudly my usual, “Right here folks, this hand, this very hand!”

I gave him my card. He showed me he read it by saying my name, “Gary.”

I nodded in agreement and said, “Diego.”

I added, “I see you’re wearing your name tag, in case you forget your name. But if you forget who you are and look in the mirror to find out, you’ll discover you’re ogeiD. That could be confusing.”

We all laughed.

People are so kind to me when I try to be clever or silly or funny. So often they’re way ahead of me.

I told Diego about my teaching career, the successes of my students, my hopes for the future and a better world.

It turns out we’re of like mind, and agree on many things. He read my mind and I read his.

He talked about his activity as an editor, developing videos, playing guitar. He’s thinking of starting a band.

He says he wants to play guitar better, but he’s lazy. I confessed my own laziness which infects me like a contagious disease.

We talked about my 40 years of teaching mostly English and he agreed with me that it’s the bedrock and foundation for all learning. “Without your language, what are you?”

Kristina was excited to see an example of today’s youth as the hope of the future.

Chaz gave his assessment. “You are intelligent and articulate.”

I was almost deliriously happy to see, after 23 years of retirement and having lost touch with today’s students and what and how their teachers are teaching them, as I try to overlook or suppress in my mind the disturbing articles I’m reading in the journals where too many “professional educators” with the “Advanced Degrees” are giving in and re-writing teaching without depth or penetration, but here before me was a genuine representative of how young people can be at their best. I don’t know how many there are or what percentage of the population, able to live comfortably and productively in this century while I’m trying to learn how to function and survive my own ineptitude.

We parted as friends, now more than acquaintances, looking forward to seeing us all again. I hope soon, because I’m not getting much younger and running out of the time I have left, though you’d hardly know it.

I said, “I hope you read my blog. There’s a lot of me in it, and soon, you.”

“I maybe probably possibly might,” he said, knowing I could see through a joke.

I said, “Apparently you were in my class without either one of us knowing it.”

It’s not just the food, or the extensive free parking, or the air conditioning, or the smells from the kitchen, it’s my need to try to steer the future.

I paid the bill and left a tip. If I had more, I’d have left more. I took the Old People’s Discount, AARP.

We got back into the car and continued down the road. Kristina took the wheel, trading places with Chaz.

I sat in the back seat and jotted all this down, smiling for miles.