Margarita and her mother Evalyn took us to Margarita's apartment, for drinks and tapas until her husband Agusti’n and daughter Carmen arrived and for a while afterwards as well. Dinner was at an Italian restaurant of remarkable authenticity and quality (yet reasonably priced), and we returned to the hotel after dinner, at half past one.

With Carmen were three of her friends, Almudena, Vanesa, and Patricia. They were from different parts of Spain, speaking Spanish with different accents and not looking alike, but all four girls were very friendly and startlingly pretty. Margarita persistently yet gracefully divided the socializing into the children (all five of us were just out of college) and the adults. Everyone except for Agusti’n spoke some English, but the conversation I was in was mostly Spanish, both over tapas and at dinner. My new friends often spoke quickly among themselves, summarizing more slowly afterwards what I did not catch or translating obscure topics into English. Mistakes of language, mine in Spanish or theirs in English, were a great source of amusement throughout the evening. Carmen and Almudena (who, by the way, has the most amazing eyes I have ever seen) had two years ago studied at UCLA, and their telling of surviving an earthquake was a favorite conversation topic of the evening; my upcoming rendevous with a friend I have never seen was a close second (I think the Spanish have an appreciation of fairy tales, and the girls considered this meeting in Venice as one).

During the past two days Pop-Pop has again and again stressed how these business acquaintences I am meeting are like family, how lucky and special he feels to have so many friendships full of love, "from the heart".

Pop-Pop may be correct in saying few businessment enjoy such friendships with each other. I have been that way, more or less, with my Pomona friends, though, and so instead of learning a grand lesson I am looking for details of how his relationships with close friends and mine differ.

One obvious difference is that Pop-Pop is just more than a peer with many of these people; they are still with J&J and doing well, but he helped many of them up the corporate ladder in the good old days. But this inequality is overshadowed by the social situations: with his job of travel Pop-Pop had and still always encounters these friends as their guest, or they as his when they visit him. I, with my Pomona friends, until my graduation was a fellow student who only in the past few months dealt much with hosting and guesting.