One Good Thing/Dancing Through

Two beautiful stories of Survival and Revival

I spent last week traveling with my husband Bruno, in Portugal.

I’ll share more of that experience later, but what is freshest on my mind at this point is the unfortunately commonplace travel nightmare we experienced when we tried to return to the United States.

A trip that was scheduled to take 10 hours turned into something of a 48-hour odyssey. This kept us stranded overnight in a strange hotel hard by a busy eight-laneVirginia highway, where we learned that the best food available to us would come from the adjacent gas station.

We stranded travelers lined up on stools at the hotel’s grim bar. Glancing at our reflection in the bar’s smokey mirror, this came to mind:

Fortunately, while still on our first drink, Bruno and I met a fellow stranded traveler — an elder roving slot machine repairman from Buffalo who told us that we could call him “Buffet Bob.”

Why aren’t you called “Buffalo Bob?” I wondered.

Bob patted his impressively trim midsection and described how he eats roughly five big meals a day and never gains an ounce. Bob said that his whole family is like that.

Swallowing my own epic envy, I offered up one of my standard ice-breakers: “Hey — has anybody ever told you that you look like…?”

I have the ability to match up people with their celebrity doppelgängers, but any time I pose this question, the person I’m asking usually says that no — no one has ever told them that they look like Elaine May or Denzel Washington or a young Toby Maguire.

But Buffet Bob came through!

When I asked him, “Hey, has anybody ever told you that you look like….?”

We both said “Alan Alda” at the same time.

It turns out that LOTS of people tell him he looks like Alan Alda.

I took this as a big win.