Adele and I were out to dinner lately with our friends Bruce and Sharon. It was rainy so the men dropped the women at the restaurant and drove to a parking spot several blocks away. During dinner, I went to the restroom. Because standing side by side at urinals is a moderately intimate thing to do, an unspoken etiquette governs our behavior in bathrooms. For starters, men do not talk to one another while peeing. They just don’t. Despite that restraint, the man next to me said exuberantly that he was having the best night of his adult life. I asked what was making his night so wonderful. He smiled broadly at me and said, “The woman I am with.” I congratulated him, wished him luck, and left the restroom.
At the end of the evening, because the rain continued, Bruce and I left the restaurant together to retrieve his car. We had walked only about thirty feet when I noticed that the man who had spoken to me in the restroom followed us out the door. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that the happy-making woman was with him. Because Bruce walks slowly, the couple soon passed us. As they did, the man turned to me and said, “See?” Truthfully, all I saw was the back of the woman, clad in a winter jacket with a scarf over her head, but out of friendliness, I responded, “Yes, I do.”
Bruce was puzzled by this interaction until I told him of my earlier conversation. And while I was happy for my bathroom buddy that he was having the best night of his adult life, I was also puzzled that he thought seeing her for several seconds from behind bundled up in a heavy jacket was all I needed to discover for myself that, yes, she was a spectacular and life-completing woman. I hoped, for her sake, that he was aware of and cherished considerably more about her as a person than I had gathered in a few seconds of walking behind her.