Greg's Tattoo

Annie sat across the table from me in a pumpkin orange shirt, smiling widely as she paused to giggle in the middle of her story, and leaning back a bit, allowing for the table's pillar candle flame to reflect in her glasses and hide her eyes from me a bit. Her brown hair fell around her face in a more sophisticated bob - an updated do since the last time I had seen her - but Annie could not neglect her inner child; she wore a glittery pink clip just at the top of her hairline.

This picture is the still I want to keep of the night. Annie in fall colors, beckoning autumn, leaning against the sandy brick wall of one of my favorite restaurants in the city, as my favorite tattooed waiter, Greg, shuffles contentedly to and from customers and smiles warmly anytime he catches my eye. I want to still hear Annie's thoughts echo off that wall in my memory, listen in again to our dialogue of desire, of carpe diem, of community. I want to see her slowly working away at her grilled chicken sandwich and remember those things we hoped for.

I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but Greg's tattoo - "please kid remember" - has somehow spoken that memo into a sort of prayer in the walls of Uncommon Ground.

In that room in particular, with its brick wall interior, its uncomfortably high window seats, and its Little-House-On-The-Prairie-fireplace, God's given me snapshots of life. I think He speaks with me there.

Annie quoted a line from one of her favorite movies tonight, a line Jeremy Piven considers aloud with John Cusack in "Serendipity": "You know the Greeks didn't write obituaries. They only asked one question after a man died: 'Did he have passion?'"

She stared at me, lost in her own thoughts a bit. Annie and I are both over-thinkers. We both claim to want our brains to take up other hobbies so we can fall asleep as easily at night as the rest of the universe, but secretly, we feel we have been permitted to enter an otherwise "off-limits" zone. This is wildly thrilling to us.

Finally, she speaks. "That's what I want! I want passion ... And, what's more, I want to stop thinking about it and live it."

To be honest, passion is not an easy thing to talk about (though Annie and I happily broached it, examining its facets for hours tonight). Passion is dangerous, it is delicious; it is rage, it is rapture. It is unsettling and unsafe; it is devoted and desirous. And just mentioning the word makes my soul feel alive.

I hope to keep that picture of my friend Annie, sitting across the table from me laughing, and hold myself accountable to living with passion.

'Cause maybe God speaks through Greg's tattoo. And maybe "please kid remember" is His prayer for me, answered through all those nuggets of memorable conversation.