March 1998
"Do you like nachos? They have like the best nachos here. The. Best."
I shift in my seat--a bit uncomfortable in the suit I am uncharacteristically wearing--as I read the description of the nachos in the menu. I wasn't quite sure sharing a plate of messy nachos during a job interview would make the "do" list in the career counseling office back at school. Still, I didn't want to be rude.
"Ah, sure, that sounds good," I say.
As I sat in Newport's Brick Ally Pub for the first time, I was about two months shy of graduating college and on my first real job interview. The Portsmouth branch of Raytheon had brought me down for a full day of interviews and put me up in a local hotel for two nights. I had taken the interview mainly for the free trip. The company where I had been working as a co-op up until that time had all but offered to turn my part time position as a super-intern into a full time role on the next project ramping up. I had sent my resume in to Raytheon mainly as a safety move. A free trip to Newport, RI was just a huge bonus.
"What do you think of downtown? Isn't it great?" Lindsey asks.
Out the picture window just a pair of steps away from our table, the cobblestone road is packed with little shops and restaurants, looking amazingly like those old seafaring towns that I've always promised myself I'd write about in my novels one day.
"Yeah, it's awesome," I tell him. "I've never been down here before. I had no idea what to expect."
When the HR woman had handed me a copy of my interview schedule that morning, my eyes had immediately locked onto the distinctively female name slated to take me on a two-hour lunch and tour of the area. A free trip to Newport and an extended lunch with a cute engineering girl? This place really knew how to woo a guy!
Unfortunately, I discovered that my first lunch in romantic Newport was not to be with the cute, blond, be-speckled math major turned programmer I had envisioned. Lindsey, as it turned out, was a six-foot-six Jamaican man about a year older than I was. That disappointment aside, I was still having a good time.
"You know this could be where it all starts for you," he goes on, using a fork to take half a dozen of the most delicious nachos I had ever seen onto his side plate. "Right here, this could be your beginning."
I look at him confused. These weren't the typical interview questions I had spent the bulk of the night before practicing answering in the hotel mirror.
"Um, I guess that's true," I say. "It's hard to believe in two months college will be over."
"And this could be it, couldn't it? This time next year you could be sitting in this place with a whole new group of friends and a whole new life. The girl you are going to marry could even be waiting around here for you. And it all starts right now."
Lindsey spoke with such enthusiastic optimism that I found it impossible not to smile at the thought. Driving down to Rhode Island for that interview, I had had no intension of even considering the job. Truth be told, I had my dream job waiting for me back home. There was no reason to be considering working for a major government contractor like Raytheon. Still...
As I sat there looking around the restaurant, the thrill of the adventure Lindsey spoke of began to fill me. I wondered who I would meet what kind of people I would come to call my friends. How would it feel to move so far from home; to make a completely fresh start in place like this?
"Maybe this is God's plan for you," Lindsey went on. "Maybe it's time to begin your life here. Like really begin something,"
I take my first bite of Brick Alley's chicken nachos as I consider the words, marveling at how good they are.
"You know something," I say. "I think you might be right."
July 1999
"Can I ask you something?"
The cute girl across the table looks up from her menu, smiling warmly. She has amazing blue eyes. Had I noticed that before?
"Ah, sure."
"Okay, I know this is only our second date and everything, but do you think our relationship has reached the point where we can order something messy like nachos?"
She laughs out loud, and I give myself a little mental high-five. Making pretty girls laugh is one of those things guys like me always take great pride in.
"I think we can handle it," she says.
I've known Kim less than a week. We'd met a few days ago, bumping into each other online and then spending the better part of a night chatting on the phone. After a pretty typical movie first date a few days before, I had invited her to come down and spent Saturday in Newport with me.
"You've love these," I tell her. "They are the best!"
"This place is amazing," she says, turning back to her menu. "I can't believe you live down here."
"Yeah, it's pretty cool. I like it better in the winter, though. All the tourists are gone, but all the restaurants and clubs are still open. It's like our own private playground."
"Well, I think a summer hanging around down here with you sounds pretty good," she said. "My friends are going to be so jealous."
"You should bring them down sometime. We can get together with my friends and all hang out."
She smiles at the thought, seeming to make quiet plans even as I made the offer. Kim and I had decided that we were going to have a summer fling together. Nothing serious. Just hang out together for the summer and have fun. After arguably the best year of my life--spent goofing around southern New England with a group of new friends--a summer spent with this pretty girl at my side seemed too good to be true.
Still, since taking the job at Raytheon and moving down here, I was getting pretty used to things feeling too good to be true.
"After we eat, do you want to walk around a bit?" I ask. "They have all kinds of shops and stuff. It's pretty fun."
"Yeah, I'd like that."
"And then maybe tonight we could hit a movie or something," I added. "There is a really cool old fashioned movie house around the corner from here."
"Or we could just rent something and go back to your place," she suggests, putting down the menu and taking a sip of her water.
I do well to keep my face casual and impassive at the suggestion.
"That could be fun, too," I say.
February 2000
"Guys, were you planning to order nachos as an appetizer? Because I was thinking of getting them as my meal."
"Oh I was going to do the same thing," Jeff says.
I share a knowing smile with Jeff. He understands the importance of nachos as well as anyone I have ever met. Over the two years we had been friends, we had shared a bond in that.
"I can't believe you are finally leaving," Chris tells me.
"And I can't believe we finally got you to come out to lunch," I tease him.
Over the past year or so, Chris had made a daily habit of stopping by our cubicles at about 11:25 to check on our lunch plans. Despite our wide variety of lunch destinations, though, he had never once opted to come out with us.
"Well, it's your last day," he says, looking over the menu. "How could I say no?"
It is more than just my last day at Raytheon, it is also my last day of having a real permanent tie to Newport. A few months back, I had moved in with Kim. Our summer fling had ended--as these things so often do--with a fancy dinner in Providence and a shiny diamond ring. Living a little over an hour north of the island had put something of a strain on an already less than ideal job.
"Hey when we get back, can I have the bridge?" Jeff asks me.
I smile wide at the question.
"It's all yours, man."
Another of our friends, Todd, had build a model of a bridge using drinking straws and scotch tape in his office in the weeks before he finally left Raytheon. He had given it to me as a farewell gift--a sort of thank you for helping him with a trial project that earned him, in part, the awesome new job. The idea was that the "magic" of the bridge would bring me luck in my own job search. The fact that I had landed what was close to my dream job at a small analog design company about twenty minutes from my house increased the legend of the bridge tenfold.
"Can I have it after you?" Rens, the other guy out to lunch with us that day, asked Jeff, drawing a laugh from all of us. He had been with Raytheon only about a year, but he, Jeff, and Chris seemed to be all that was left of our old group. It seemed that my time at Raytheon--and Newport in general--was just about over.
"You know what I am going to miss more than anything?" I asked, closing my menu having long since decided on my own order of nachos.
They look at me with half smiles, waiting for the inevitable punch line. I only begin to realize in that moment how much I am going to miss spending every day with such good friends.
"Lunch," I tell them.
November 2002
"Babe, just order your own nachos as a meal, and we'll get a couple orders for the table," Kim said, pulling the menu from my hands and ending my pointless mental debate over what to order.
"I don't want to be a nacho hog."
"It's your birthday!" she said with a wide smile. "You get all the nachos you want!"
Eight of us are sitting a> long table in the back of Brick Alley. Kim was three month pregnant that night, but she didn't let it stop her from throwing me a crazy birthday night out in Newport with stops at all of our favorite old haunts. We'd gotten tattoos at our favorite shop in Middletown--well, Debbi and I got tattoos, everyone else had chickened out--gone for drinks at Coddington's, and now we were all grabbing dinner at my favorite restaurant before heading out to the Blues Cafe--Newport's answer to Dan Aykroyd's little place.
"All right, nachos it is!" I said, lifting up my shirt sleeve for the dozenth time in the last hour to look at the new tattoo on my arm.
"Still glad you got it?" Kim asked me.
"Oh god yes. I am having the best night. Thanks so much for all of this."
She simply gives me a quick kiss and smiles before returning her attention to her own menu. Thankfully her appetite had returned with the start of her second trimester and eating out at awesome restaurants was a bit more fun for her.
"Jason, what did you say you were this year again?" Ginger called out to me from the far end of the table where she and Crystal are talking with Todd and Jesse. "A binomial number?"
The girls giggle as she asks the question, both still not quite used to life with a certified math geek married to one of their best friends.
"No," I correct her, "my birthday is a binary number--November tenth, one-one, one-zero. But as of tonight, my age is a perfect cube."
They burst out in a fit of laughter, clearly not sure what a perfect cube is but decidedly amused that I am so excited by the prospect. They look to Todd and Jesse, expecting them to find my explanation just as entertaining. But my friends--as fine math geeks as I have ever known in their own right--just nod along with wry smiles.
"Dude, you are twenty-seven this year?" Todd asked, drawing a loud wave of laughter from the whole table.
I laugh along with them, feeling happy and justified in my exponentially significant milestone birthday. And I also feel so tremendously lucky to be sitting with so many friends in what has to be my most favorite spot in the world as I mark it.
August 2008
"Babe, are you drinking?" Kim asks me as we slide into a small table deep inside Brick Alley.
"Ah, if you are driving back to the place I am."
She just smiles as she slides the drink menu over to me.
"All right, then," I tell her, "let's get this vacation started!"
We've officially been on vacation for a whole hour, having had just enough time to drop our bags off at the bed and breakfast and head downtown for a drink.
"This is probably the last real vacation you're going to have for a while," Kim says, "I want you to live it up!"
I nod as I look over the drink menu, having no trouble taking her advice. I've just started a new job--an entirely new career, actually. It's an amazing opportunity and I can't remember a time in my life when I've felt better about what I did for a living, but the one downside is my vacation time over the next few years will be severely limited.
"I can't believe we are finally here," I say, handing the menu back to Kim after deciding on the triple-shot chocolate martini. "It's been way too long since we've been down here."
"Well you've got four whole days to soak it up," Kim says, looking over the drink menu herself. "Let's enjoy it while it lasts."
We had rented a small beach house--a beach house located about three miles from the actual beach, but a beach house nonetheless--for the week with some friends. I was only staying for the first half of the week, though, heading to New York City midweek for a writing conference.
"How many times do you think we can eat here this week before we get sick of it?" I ask.
Kim gives me an amused look over the top of the menu.
"I'll come as often as you want," she tells me.
Looking around the familiar restaurant, I feel at home. So much has happened to me since the first time I sat in here. I've made friends I never expected to find, found a career I never knew existed, and come to understand what I wanted to do with my life with a clarity that I had never thought possible. The last decade had brought me a wife, a daughter, and a better, stronger, happier version of myself. And through it all, there had been delicious, wonderful nachos to mark each and every step on the path.
"Are you two just having drinks today?"
I pull myself from my thoughts and find our waitress standing over us, her pad and pen ready to take our order. Kim and I lock eyes across the table and share a wide smile.
"We're going to have some nachos, too," we tell her together.
"Do you like nachos? They have like the best nachos here. The. Best."
I shift in my seat--a bit uncomfortable in the suit I am uncharacteristically wearing--as I read the description of the nachos in the menu. I wasn't quite sure sharing a plate of messy nachos during a job interview would make the "do" list in the career counseling office back at school. Still, I didn't want to be rude.
"Ah, sure, that sounds good," I say.
As I sat in Newport's Brick Ally Pub for the first time, I was about two months shy of graduating college and on my first real job interview. The Portsmouth branch of Raytheon had brought me down for a full day of interviews and put me up in a local hotel for two nights. I had taken the interview mainly for the free trip. The company where I had been working as a co-op up until that time had all but offered to turn my part time position as a super-intern into a full time role on the next project ramping up. I had sent my resume in to Raytheon mainly as a safety move. A free trip to Newport, RI was just a huge bonus.
"What do you think of downtown? Isn't it great?" Lindsey asks.
Out the picture window just a pair of steps away from our table, the cobblestone road is packed with little shops and restaurants, looking amazingly like those old seafaring towns that I've always promised myself I'd write about in my novels one day.
"Yeah, it's awesome," I tell him. "I've never been down here before. I had no idea what to expect."
When the HR woman had handed me a copy of my interview schedule that morning, my eyes had immediately locked onto the distinctively female name slated to take me on a two-hour lunch and tour of the area. A free trip to Newport and an extended lunch with a cute engineering girl? This place really knew how to woo a guy!
Unfortunately, I discovered that my first lunch in romantic Newport was not to be with the cute, blond, be-speckled math major turned programmer I had envisioned. Lindsey, as it turned out, was a six-foot-six Jamaican man about a year older than I was. That disappointment aside, I was still having a good time.
"You know this could be where it all starts for you," he goes on, using a fork to take half a dozen of the most delicious nachos I had ever seen onto his side plate. "Right here, this could be your beginning."
I look at him confused. These weren't the typical interview questions I had spent the bulk of the night before practicing answering in the hotel mirror.
"Um, I guess that's true," I say. "It's hard to believe in two months college will be over."
"And this could be it, couldn't it? This time next year you could be sitting in this place with a whole new group of friends and a whole new life. The girl you are going to marry could even be waiting around here for you. And it all starts right now."
Lindsey spoke with such enthusiastic optimism that I found it impossible not to smile at the thought. Driving down to Rhode Island for that interview, I had had no intension of even considering the job. Truth be told, I had my dream job waiting for me back home. There was no reason to be considering working for a major government contractor like Raytheon. Still...
As I sat there looking around the restaurant, the thrill of the adventure Lindsey spoke of began to fill me. I wondered who I would meet what kind of people I would come to call my friends. How would it feel to move so far from home; to make a completely fresh start in place like this?
"Maybe this is God's plan for you," Lindsey went on. "Maybe it's time to begin your life here. Like really begin something,"
I take my first bite of Brick Alley's chicken nachos as I consider the words, marveling at how good they are.
"You know something," I say. "I think you might be right."
July 1999
"Can I ask you something?"
The cute girl across the table looks up from her menu, smiling warmly. She has amazing blue eyes. Had I noticed that before?
"Ah, sure."
"Okay, I know this is only our second date and everything, but do you think our relationship has reached the point where we can order something messy like nachos?"
She laughs out loud, and I give myself a little mental high-five. Making pretty girls laugh is one of those things guys like me always take great pride in.
"I think we can handle it," she says.
I've known Kim less than a week. We'd met a few days ago, bumping into each other online and then spending the better part of a night chatting on the phone. After a pretty typical movie first date a few days before, I had invited her to come down and spent Saturday in Newport with me.
"You've love these," I tell her. "They are the best!"
"This place is amazing," she says, turning back to her menu. "I can't believe you live down here."
"Yeah, it's pretty cool. I like it better in the winter, though. All the tourists are gone, but all the restaurants and clubs are still open. It's like our own private playground."
"Well, I think a summer hanging around down here with you sounds pretty good," she said. "My friends are going to be so jealous."
"You should bring them down sometime. We can get together with my friends and all hang out."
She smiles at the thought, seeming to make quiet plans even as I made the offer. Kim and I had decided that we were going to have a summer fling together. Nothing serious. Just hang out together for the summer and have fun. After arguably the best year of my life--spent goofing around southern New England with a group of new friends--a summer spent with this pretty girl at my side seemed too good to be true.
Still, since taking the job at Raytheon and moving down here, I was getting pretty used to things feeling too good to be true.
"After we eat, do you want to walk around a bit?" I ask. "They have all kinds of shops and stuff. It's pretty fun."
"Yeah, I'd like that."
"And then maybe tonight we could hit a movie or something," I added. "There is a really cool old fashioned movie house around the corner from here."
"Or we could just rent something and go back to your place," she suggests, putting down the menu and taking a sip of her water.
I do well to keep my face casual and impassive at the suggestion.
"That could be fun, too," I say.
February 2000
"Guys, were you planning to order nachos as an appetizer? Because I was thinking of getting them as my meal."
"Oh I was going to do the same thing," Jeff says.
I share a knowing smile with Jeff. He understands the importance of nachos as well as anyone I have ever met. Over the two years we had been friends, we had shared a bond in that.
"I can't believe you are finally leaving," Chris tells me.
"And I can't believe we finally got you to come out to lunch," I tease him.
Over the past year or so, Chris had made a daily habit of stopping by our cubicles at about 11:25 to check on our lunch plans. Despite our wide variety of lunch destinations, though, he had never once opted to come out with us.
"Well, it's your last day," he says, looking over the menu. "How could I say no?"
It is more than just my last day at Raytheon, it is also my last day of having a real permanent tie to Newport. A few months back, I had moved in with Kim. Our summer fling had ended--as these things so often do--with a fancy dinner in Providence and a shiny diamond ring. Living a little over an hour north of the island had put something of a strain on an already less than ideal job.
"Hey when we get back, can I have the bridge?" Jeff asks me.
I smile wide at the question.
"It's all yours, man."
Another of our friends, Todd, had build a model of a bridge using drinking straws and scotch tape in his office in the weeks before he finally left Raytheon. He had given it to me as a farewell gift--a sort of thank you for helping him with a trial project that earned him, in part, the awesome new job. The idea was that the "magic" of the bridge would bring me luck in my own job search. The fact that I had landed what was close to my dream job at a small analog design company about twenty minutes from my house increased the legend of the bridge tenfold.
"Can I have it after you?" Rens, the other guy out to lunch with us that day, asked Jeff, drawing a laugh from all of us. He had been with Raytheon only about a year, but he, Jeff, and Chris seemed to be all that was left of our old group. It seemed that my time at Raytheon--and Newport in general--was just about over.
"You know what I am going to miss more than anything?" I asked, closing my menu having long since decided on my own order of nachos.
They look at me with half smiles, waiting for the inevitable punch line. I only begin to realize in that moment how much I am going to miss spending every day with such good friends.
"Lunch," I tell them.
November 2002
"Babe, just order your own nachos as a meal, and we'll get a couple orders for the table," Kim said, pulling the menu from my hands and ending my pointless mental debate over what to order.
"I don't want to be a nacho hog."
"It's your birthday!" she said with a wide smile. "You get all the nachos you want!"
Eight of us are sitting a> long table in the back of Brick Alley. Kim was three month pregnant that night, but she didn't let it stop her from throwing me a crazy birthday night out in Newport with stops at all of our favorite old haunts. We'd gotten tattoos at our favorite shop in Middletown--well, Debbi and I got tattoos, everyone else had chickened out--gone for drinks at Coddington's, and now we were all grabbing dinner at my favorite restaurant before heading out to the Blues Cafe--Newport's answer to Dan Aykroyd's little place.
"All right, nachos it is!" I said, lifting up my shirt sleeve for the dozenth time in the last hour to look at the new tattoo on my arm.
"Still glad you got it?" Kim asked me.
"Oh god yes. I am having the best night. Thanks so much for all of this."
She simply gives me a quick kiss and smiles before returning her attention to her own menu. Thankfully her appetite had returned with the start of her second trimester and eating out at awesome restaurants was a bit more fun for her.
"Jason, what did you say you were this year again?" Ginger called out to me from the far end of the table where she and Crystal are talking with Todd and Jesse. "A binomial number?"
The girls giggle as she asks the question, both still not quite used to life with a certified math geek married to one of their best friends.
"No," I correct her, "my birthday is a binary number--November tenth, one-one, one-zero. But as of tonight, my age is a perfect cube."
They burst out in a fit of laughter, clearly not sure what a perfect cube is but decidedly amused that I am so excited by the prospect. They look to Todd and Jesse, expecting them to find my explanation just as entertaining. But my friends--as fine math geeks as I have ever known in their own right--just nod along with wry smiles.
"Dude, you are twenty-seven this year?" Todd asked, drawing a loud wave of laughter from the whole table.
I laugh along with them, feeling happy and justified in my exponentially significant milestone birthday. And I also feel so tremendously lucky to be sitting with so many friends in what has to be my most favorite spot in the world as I mark it.
August 2008
"Babe, are you drinking?" Kim asks me as we slide into a small table deep inside Brick Alley.
"Ah, if you are driving back to the place I am."
She just smiles as she slides the drink menu over to me.
"All right, then," I tell her, "let's get this vacation started!"
We've officially been on vacation for a whole hour, having had just enough time to drop our bags off at the bed and breakfast and head downtown for a drink.
"This is probably the last real vacation you're going to have for a while," Kim says, "I want you to live it up!"
I nod as I look over the drink menu, having no trouble taking her advice. I've just started a new job--an entirely new career, actually. It's an amazing opportunity and I can't remember a time in my life when I've felt better about what I did for a living, but the one downside is my vacation time over the next few years will be severely limited.
"I can't believe we are finally here," I say, handing the menu back to Kim after deciding on the triple-shot chocolate martini. "It's been way too long since we've been down here."
"Well you've got four whole days to soak it up," Kim says, looking over the drink menu herself. "Let's enjoy it while it lasts."
We had rented a small beach house--a beach house located about three miles from the actual beach, but a beach house nonetheless--for the week with some friends. I was only staying for the first half of the week, though, heading to New York City midweek for a writing conference.
"How many times do you think we can eat here this week before we get sick of it?" I ask.
Kim gives me an amused look over the top of the menu.
"I'll come as often as you want," she tells me.
Looking around the familiar restaurant, I feel at home. So much has happened to me since the first time I sat in here. I've made friends I never expected to find, found a career I never knew existed, and come to understand what I wanted to do with my life with a clarity that I had never thought possible. The last decade had brought me a wife, a daughter, and a better, stronger, happier version of myself. And through it all, there had been delicious, wonderful nachos to mark each and every step on the path.
"Are you two just having drinks today?"
I pull myself from my thoughts and find our waitress standing over us, her pad and pen ready to take our order. Kim and I lock eyes across the table and share a wide smile.
"We're going to have some nachos, too," we tell her together.
