Sarah and I have been married for a year now. We include the trip to the Bahamas as the major celebratory component of our anniversary but we also took a walk to Pho Lemongrass and ate dinner. I noticed on the door a shaggy picture of former president Al Gore with the staff of the restaurant from some time that he visited Brookline around the corner from us.

Sarah and I had included in our stack of DVDs for watching on our anniversary the movies American Beauty and the Squid and the Whale. Both are portraits of dysfunctional families and marriages that are eroded and falling apart. American Beauty was a much better movie of the two. The Squid movie characters were so annoying and idiosyncratic that it was painful to watch. Sarah fell asleep. The ending of the Squid and the Whale interested me though because the teen son goes back to the museum of natural history to look at an exhibit that he remembered from ‘The good days’ of his memories.

When I worked at ChannelWave I used to go to Au Bon Pain in Kendall Square on a regular basis. It wasn’t the closest place to get a coffee or a sandwich. Pete’s was on the way and the Bean Town was just downstairs in our building. But I would walk there particularly when I was frustrated with work, people, and the world. Au Bon Pain had placed an article on the wall in the middle because they were mentioned in it. It was a Newsweek article from 1997 that described hot high-tech cities for starting companies. The article mentioned Au Bon Pain in Kendall as a great place where techies hang out and build new ideas into businesses. The picture for Boston was a photo taken through the glass door at VirtuMall of Ron and me.

So Au Bon Pain in Kendall Square was the only place in the world where a picture of me hung, unbeknownst to them. Nobody ever noticed or recognized the picture while I was eating my asiago cheese bagels or ordering a sandwich with their herbed mayo, brie, and chicken. I just went there because it made me feel important for a moment. Maybe everyone has these private places? A few years ago they remodeled to improve the efficiency of the restaurant. The took down the article.