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Thanksgiving – Commentary Lesson

Hi, this is Kristin. Welcome back to the commentary for the conversation Thanksgiving. So as mentioned in the conversation, Thanksgiving is a time to get together with family, sometimes friends, eat a lot of food and, as Joe said in the conversation, y’know, it’s a time to really think about things you might be grateful for in your life. Time to give thanks.

Well, for Joe and I, it’s also a time of year to celebrate when we first met. And I thought I would tell you a little bit about that. So we met 10 years ago. We were introduced through a mutual friend. So this friend had actually been telling me about Joe and she’d been telling Joe about me. And telling each of us that she thought that we would really like each other, that we seemed to have a lot in common. Have a lot in common means that we had a lot of the same interests.

So, for me, I listened to her but I, y’know, I didn’t think too much about it. And I think it was the same for Joe. Well, my friend, or our friend, worked at a bar and she and I were actually going to be leaving, 10 years ago, we were going to be leaving to go out of town for the Thanksgiving holiday. We were going to celebrate Thanksgiving in a town about, I can’t remember, four or five hours north of San Francisco, still in California, actually up near the state of Oregon.

So she had to work late at the bar that night and she was going to be driving because I didn’t own a car so I was going to ride with her. So she said, y’know, why don’t…we were going to leave right after she got off from work when the bar closed at 2:00 in the morning. We were going to leave and she wanted to drive through the night to get to this place.

And so she said, “Why don’t you come to the bar a little early and hang out for a bit and then when I finish work, we’ll just leave straight from here.” And I said, “Okay.” And she told me that Joe might actually be at the bar. And I thought, “Okay, well, if he is, he is.” And I’d actually seen a picture of him, too, and I think she had showed him a picture of me.

So sure enough, he was at the bar with a friend of his and when I walked into the bar, and she had told him that I would be coming as well. So when I walked into the bar, I happened to look over, I saw my friend at the bar, I said hello, and I looked over and I recognized Joe from the picture she had showed me. So he said, “Oh, hey come over.” He recognized me as well. He said, “Oh, come over, come over.” Y’know, come have a drink with us.

So I said, “Okay, give me a minute.” So I went and put my stuff that I was taking to go out of town, I went and put it in a back room where my friend took me. And I came back out and sat down and was finally introduced to Joe and he introduced me to his friend, Jason. And my friend who was working at the bar was absolutely right. Joe and I had a lot in common. We had a lot of the same interests. We learned, for example, that we really liked to travel.

In fact, his first time traveling, he was in Southeast Asia and was in Thailand when the tsunami hit and I was actually living there at the time. So we were in Thailand at the same time and we started talking about some of the same places, places that he visited while he was there and places that I knew well, for example, a restaurant, a Middle-Eastern restaurant in Bangkok that I went to a lot to eat. He totally knew where that place was. He ate there a lot, too, when he was in and out of Bangkok.

So that was one thing that we had in common. Another thing was that he was, still is, a vegan. Vegan meaning he does not eat any kind of food that comes from an animal. And I had just become a vegan.

So immediately we had that connection. And in fact, so this was the night before Thanksgiving. And he and his friend Jason, Jason is also vegan, were going to be preparing…Jason had a family actually, so Joe and Jason and Jason’s family were going to be having a big Thanksgiving feast. Feast means a big meal.

And so knowing that they were both vegan and Thanksgiving food is typically not vegan at all. There’s a lot of butter used. Of course, there’s meat. There’s milk in a lot of the food. I was very curious because I don’t really cook. So I was very curious what they were making. So Joe gets out a list and starts telling me all the food that they’d actually even started preparing that night before going to my friends’ bar. And I was just amazed.

And I remember thinking, “Wow, I wish I wasn’t going out of town with my friend. I wish I was coming and eating Thanksgiving dinner with you guys. This sounds like it’s going to be an amazing meal.” And I remember Joe asking me, “Well, you’ve just recently become vegan, how’s it been?” And I was like, “Oh, it’s been very challenging for me because I don’t cook. I eat out a lot.”

And even though there’s many restaurants here in San Francisco where we live that are vegan-friendly, it’s still, y’know, you get tired of eating at the same restaurants. So honestly, if I hadn’t met Joe and…I don’t know that I would still be vegan, unless I’d met another vegan who cooked.

But anyway, going back to the story, so we had a lot of connections and really liked each other. And so he and his friend Jason ended up leaving the bar before me that night. And so he actually asked for my phone number. And he knew that my friend and I were leaving to go out of town and so he waited until he knew…we were gone for three days, maybe, so he waited until he knew we had come back and he called me.

And when he called me then, we must have talked on the phone for, I don’t know, one or two hours, just getting to know each other. And the, y’know, we decided…or he said, “Oh, we should go out.” And I agreed. So we decided to go to a movie. We chose the movie together. And the rest is history. What that means is, here we are 10 years later, still together.

So that’s a little inside story of how Joe and I met, 10 years ago, at this time, Thanksgiving. So actually, as I said in my vocabulary lesson, Thanksgiving is not always on the same day every year. It’s, I believe that’s the only holiday that’s like that. But it’s always on a Thursday, so the year, 10 years ago, it must have been on November 22 because we met the day before Thanksgiving, the night before, and that was November 21 that year.

Okay, so this is the end of the commentary. I hope you enjoyed hearing how Joe and I met. Have a good month and I’ll see you next time. Bye-bye.