Friend #35 - Gordon

I was walking into my favorite martini bar to meet a new friend when I got a text saying the woman wasn’t going to be able to make it because of a family emergency.  I was bummed.  Normally I might have turned around and left.  But this was my favorite martini place… I figured one martini wasn’t going to hurt anyone so I took a seat at the bar and buried my face in my phone. 

After a while, I heard a soft voice behind me say, “Is anyone sitting here?”

I looked up to see an older black man pointing at the seat to my left.  A quick assessment of the bar made me realize the only two empty seats were on either side of me. 

“No, the seat is yours,” I declared.  “In fact, if you are meeting someone, I’d be happy to move down one.”

Gordon shook his head and told me he was by himself so I took the cue and put my phone away.  Would I have done that if I wasn’t on a mission to make friends this year?  I’m not sure.

Gordon told grew up in Oakland, California.  His mother was an alcoholic.  He never knew his father.  It was just after World War II and back in those days, if you were a person of color, equality was a distant dream.  Gordon remembers back during times when a person wasn’t allowed north of Van Buren in Phoenix if they were black or Hispanic.  That was a shocking to me!  But it has to be true because he quickly Googled an article on his phone and there was the history laid out in black and white.

Gordon spent over forty years in the IT industry.  I asked him how he got his start.  Honestly, the story somehow got mixed in with my martini but the gist is that he had a buddy who told him there was a pig farmer in Australia, who was being subsidized to bring on personnel and train them in the IT industry.  I guess the guy had other businesses other than pig farming.  But since the farmer was from Australia, he didn’t care about the color of a person’s skin just as long as he got his money.  Gordon and his buddy both went through the training program.  Gordon’s buddy dropped out, but Gordon made a life out of it.

And he hates social media.  In the 1960’s, Gordon worked for a bank that was already linking people via their relationships to approve them for loans…and that was in the 1960’s!  Today, Gordon says that if a person wanted to, they could find any personal information they wanted with a few flicks of their finger.  Social media just makes everything more convenient to link together, your entire life mapped out on a screen. 

In fact, he lived his entire life on the other side of that computer screen until he finally retired a year ago.  “No one tells you what happens when you age,” he said taking a sip of his cocktail.  He stared into the glass longingly and confessed everyone he knew in Phoenix was still working.  He now fills his days watching Maury, a show he didn’t even know existed until he was banished from his career.  Most of the people he knows still live in Oakland, but the cost of living keeps him from being able to return.  “No one makes friends after fifty,” he said.  Unfortunately, based on what I have seen, he may be largely right.

So Gordon fills his weekends trying out the best restaurants Phoenix and Scottsdale have to offer.  He has a list in his phone of the ones he particularly likes.  Some of them I knew.  Some of them I’d like to try.  But as I sat on the bar stool next to him, I realized the most well-seasoned and flavor-filled thing in the entire restaurant was the older man who often sat at the bar on Saturday nights alone. 

Not once did I feel like he was hitting on me.  Not once did I feel threatened.  We were just two strangers enjoying each other’s company on a night otherwise empty for us both.