I was shaking his hand before I knew who he was. (I always watch the hand during a handshake, only looking at the face once a firm grip is established. Having managed to miss people's hands before, I tend to risk the lesser social error.)

In fairness, I was looking for a wheelchair rather than a handshake. I was beside a bank of elevators in a medical building lobby, and trying to figure out how I was to get my bride from the car to the orthopedist. Her bum knee had not been accepting weight since an ill-fated step the evening before, and she and I had spent the intervening long dark hours sobbing, and trying to accommodate, respectively.

I had gotten a bit of wheelchair practice already that day, as my son's super-specialized, impossible-to-reschedule quarterly doctor's appointment had been the first stop of the day. I'd had a handy staffer there to beg that chair from, the one which had carried my bride into the jargon-ridden negotiation which had somehow put my only son on lithium. I was still a bit boggled from hearing that discussion as the fourth person in the two-person exam room. From wrapping myself around my son and singing songs with him, to calm him while blood was drawn.

A hearty handshake was nowhere on my horizon.

Still, I was happy to see the face, once I saw it. It had been half a decade or more since he had been selling the work I would do, back when he had been just a pup. My smile of recognition led him into the usual salesperson small talk, the reflexive acts of networking I can recognize but not fully understand. I was happy to play along, though, and therefore stepped onto the elevator with the crowd he was in.

I discounted the blonde who was watching us as we rode upward, and asked what he was doing these days. "Still selling knees and elbows," he replied as the door opened; of course, that's true, I'd forgotten that line was the business he'd left us for. Still, knowing that solved a problem for me - he was doubtless going to sell those knees and elbows at the same office whose location I couldn't quite recall, so I resolved to let him lead as we departed. I'd ask about wheelchairs when we got there.

We followed the crowd and the blonde through the generic floor of the building, with the conversation having progressed to what old friends were doing now. I babbled somewhat to him as we went through the generic door, and settled in at the end of the line. Sort of unlike me, really.

I was so happy to be living in a day other than the one I'd been having.

It was something of a shock when the blonde turned and asked my old acquaintance a quiet question. I blinked and reviewed the situation in light of this new input, and within seconds many important things had become clear.

I had indeed remembered his name right. I'd been avoiding using it since I was only 90% sure after all those years; we'd not really been that close, and leaving him unnamed had been the lesser social error.

She had seemed vaguely familiar because I'd met her way back when; at that point, she'd been his bride-to-be. Her name, I'd no hope of recalling.

He wasn't on the job that day at all, it suddenly seemed. He only sounded like he was working, because that was the way he always sounded. The interest he was taking in what I was saying was only the polite version that salespeople are taught.

Also, there was a reason the generic decor seemed just a little off; I was one floor below where I had expected to be. While the layout of the place was just like the orthopedist's, some of the subtleties were done up differently. The fertility clinic management had slightly different tastes.

I wrapped up my story mid-paragraph, with another handshake and his name. I'd spent my allotted time in the line in which we stood, and as a result, my place was elsewhere. The identical looks on his face and his wife's seemed to indicate agreement on that point.

I walked out to return to my Valentine's Day, suppressing the urge to advise him to leave as well. Perhaps it would have been a kindness to speak to him about how it all might turn out, but staying silent seemed the lesser social error.