
We got a great table on the front porch and started studying the menu. He was pleased to take advantage of their having Peroni, an Italian beer, on tap (his enthusiasm leaving me bummed once again about being such a bad Irishman that I have no taste for beer), and I found a glass of Zonin, a Montepulciano that I hadn't tried, that I found enjoyable enough. It took us a little bit of time to decide what to have because the options sounded so good. Bob eventually went with their Lobster Ravioli, served in a vodka cream sauce, which I had a taste of and which was scrumptious beyond reason (making me somewhat regret having anything else). But I went with one of their dinner specials for the night: the most fabulous seared salmon with capers, asparagus, and a zucchini and squash medley. It equaled the other dish and left me interrupting the conversation throughout to wax rhapsodic on the radiant joy of food!
So we talked about wine, women, and song – all manner of good things. He told me some more about growing up in Louisiana, about his family and the circle of friends he's cultivated down here. I couldn't help but admire his taste in knowing what the basic Good Stuff of life seemed to be. We compared travel notes, and he told me about high school adventures and misadventures in Rome when he took an overseas trip his senior year, and we talked about the attractions of Italy as we drank some more of what Italy had to offer.

There was more background talk than we'd ever had before, telling stories of family and where we had come from than we had known of one another, and I heard a lot more about growing up in the New Orleans area and some of its peculiar cultural tendencies than I had perhaps heard from other students. Unlike a lot of New Orleans natives that I had met, Chelsey wasn't utterly married to the idea of remaining in the area, whereas so many others are so taken with the city and its culture that they cannot imagine living anywhere else. (As devoted as New Yorkers, I've said, but not so arrogant about their place being the only place to live.) As far along as she was with her work in sports promotion, she had a number of other sites where she would be interested in working once her current internship was over. And so there was a certain amount of conversation about living in different places and the changes that come with different job prospects. There were only touches of "shop" talk having to do with the coursework we did together, most recently being my Modern Christian Thought class, other than her laughing about her mother noticing that since graduation she's been reading a lot more freely in the ethics direction, and so we talked a little about the temptation that some further graduate work has for her in wooing her away from the kind of business work she's been preparing for for so long.