An aborted meeting…
I was in Starbucks this afternoon to fulfill an internal hankering for a Latte.
Standing behind me in the queue was a peculiar man with a pair of interesting looking Winkle Pickers. They were similiar to these ones:
He looked like he was from another era.
He also wore tweed pedal pushers and had a handle bar mustache.
We collected our coffees at the same time and brought them over to the special counter where you put your sugar in your coffee and get those wooden poky things to stir it with.
We stood side by side and did our business; tearing sugar sachets, pulling out napkins, licking foam from the stirring sticks and readjusting our coffee lids.
All of a sudden I felt compelled to turn to him and ask:
“Do you think we will ever stand side by side again?”…
Was his reply as interesting as his shoes!?
Well I don’t know because I never asked him… I will never know now… maybe he had an important message for me.
You experience reminded me of one of my most favourite stories, ‘The Night Train at Deoli’, by Ruskin Bond, an Anglo India Writer from the Himalayas.
Thank you so much. I love it when the experience ends at unknown possibilities. Here’s the summary of it: (sorry for I couldn’t find the entire story for you 
Night Train at Deoli by Ruskin Bond (1990) (India)
The university student narrator tells of his train ride every summer to visit his grandmother.
In the early pre-dawn hours, the train stops at Deoli where “nothing ever happens.” This sets
up the encounter between the boy and the young girl selling baskets. She is poor, barefoot,
thinly clothed, but “then those eyes, searching and eloquent, met mine.” (2) He jumps off the
train to get closer and buys a basket. The train whistle brings him back. On his return trip to
Delhi, he sees her at the station again, and this time, he meets her and talks to her briefly.
The third time he vows to be bolder in expressing his feelings, but she is not there and no one
at the station can tell him where she is. His true feelings come out:
What could I do about finding a girl I had seen only twice, who had hardly spoken
to me, and about whom I knew nothing-absolutely nothing-but for whom I felt a
tenderness and responsibility that I had never felt before? (5)
The student fantasizes stopping at Deoli, getting off the train and looking for her, but he never
does. The final paragraph is written years later, in retrospect, “I never break my journey to
Deoli, but I pass through as often as I can” (6).