Fare Ther Well

I have an acquaintance, or a friend of a friend, that I rarely see.. Maybe once every five years for the past 15 years. He is a German immigrant with a thick German dialect that's hard for me to understand, particularly if he has been drinking. Through social media we both found out we would be attending, along with 70,000 other people, the Grateful Dead's supposedly last concert at Chicago's Soldier Field on July 2016. We exchanged cell numbers and said lets meet up. I called V on the way in in front Millineal Park. His accent and the background noise made him very hard to understand, but I gathered he was on a moored sailboat on the opposite side of the stadium, and my husband and sister-n-law scrapped that plan to meet up in favor of seeing their friends. After an hour and a half, the show was going to start and I felt a little bummed I hadn't got to hang out with V. We go through our last checkpoint, on the opposite of the stadium from the docks/lake, before entering the stairs and out of 70,000 people we run into V. We have a beer together. He says something understated and at the same time profound, like always and we say goodbye.