A few days ago, a local restaurant, Red Onion, closed its doors. I ate there periodically through the decades, but recent mention of the establishment triggered an almost forty-year-old memory.
For the first five months of 1986, fresh out of college, I was employed as a front desk clerk at the newly opened Sheraton Hotel in Boone, North Carolina. It was the largest and nicest hotel in town at that time.
One evening, as I stood engaged in a phone conversation, a man walked up to the desk donning...