The reservation form had a slot for “special occasion” so I wrote “birthday.” At the end of the dinner the manager walked over and asked whose birthday it was. I said it was mine and asked where he was from.
“France,” he said.
“Whereabouts?” I asked.
“The Basque country,” he said.
I told him I’d spent a year in Aix-en-Provence. He complimented me on my French. A short while later I saw him talking to a colleague, who soon appeared at our table, also speaking French, and bearing four glasses and four bottles of spirits. He was from Auvergne. I told him of the wedding we once attended in Yssingeaux. He said he knew the small town. Then he explained what he was pouring: sake, Sancerre, tokay, and port. A “tour du monde” he called it, in four glasses.
We chatted some more, and then sipped our drinks, enjoying the most spontaneously festive moment we’d experienced in over a year.
