I Saw Ben Gross

Today I went on a field trip out and about in Berkeley, walking in the warm midday sunshine to the Goodwill for overalls to take back to camp and then on to the Cheeseboard to buy a challah for Shabbat dinner. Ducking into Village Grounds on Shattuck for a quick afternoon pick-me-up in the form of an iced latte, I was completely stunned to look up from paying and randomly see Ben Gross standing in the street talking on the phone.

Ben Gross is part of Matt's posse, one of the many people I met back in the dot-com millionaire days when we first moved to San Francisco in August 1999. Ben, Alan with the constant stream of Eurotrash girlfriends, the three guys with the exact same first name who all lived together at Casa Dave down in Mountain View, the ever-vague and constantly-pallid Luke, my oldest friend Jonathan who invited me up from Morgan Hill to a movie screening in an abandoned military hangar on Moffitt Air Force Base and later to a barbecue at the house he owns in San Jose, Mark and Elliot from the San Francisco office of Internet start-up #4 which was the company whose crash and burn sent us to Europe for five weeks in the summer of 2002, and of course the absolutely legendary Jim Browne who denies his conspiracy theorist identity and would hate with the white-hot passion of a thousand suns the fact that I have published his first and last name together on the Internet...they are all part of that crew and there were not many girls, not at the beginning anyway, only three of us to start with: Jen, Jillian, and me and for some reason Ben Gross and I had a now-long-forgotten disagreement which led to me teasing him on every eVite for the next eight years that I would only come to whatever SOMA-loft party it was "...if Ben Gross is going to be there."

Finally last fall while having brunch with everyone at Matt's house Ben asked me what it was that started us off on our adversarial path, what we've been un-fighting about for so long. I could not even remember and I told him as much. He could not remember either. Since then it has been much more comfortable between us and he has been giving me nice hugs at brunches and birthday parties. So when I saw him outside the cafe I paid for my drink and ran out into the street, hoping to say hello now that we actually get along but finally walking away in frustration once I realized he was nowhere to be found. Just as I was sending Matt SMS to ask for Ben's phone number, Ben himself re-emerged from the cafe where he had gone inside to look for me just as I had come out to look for him. We spent the next forty-five minutes talking about everything from Skype to Amsterdam and in the end I was the lucky recipient of one of the now-legendary Ben Gross hugs before we parted ways.

Small Bay Area world...