I come to DC fairly regularly but mostly stay in the Reston area where my office is. It used to be the case that the office was in Arlington and because of business reasons, I had to come every week. 143 nights in 2011, I slept at the Marriott Keybridge.

After nearly two years, I spent last night at the same hotel since I had a customer meeting in Alexandria.

After finishing the early morning run by the Potomac river (it is one of my most favorite running trail), took a quick shower and was almost stepping out of the hotel (I was running late) when I started to wonder if Ruth was still working there. Turned around, went to the Concierge Lounge on the 12th floor – and sure enough she was there!! Age has started to take its toll but her spirits were high still!

Every single day, this grandmother would greet me and make me fresh pot of coffee. She did the same today! I pushed my office meeting and decided to spend ten minutes with her to catch up on her life.

She has completed 35 years with Marriott!! 20 years at the same hotel!!! Born in Danville (near here) she has spent most of her life here. She has heard a lot of stories about other places from the hotel guests but never has traveled anywhere!

She makes friends with transient guests like me (or even employees) who come regularly for some time and then go away for ever. She had amazing memories of a lot of her guests that she has not seen for aeons and aeons. Just like we form relationships in our life. Except her movie of life always runs on fast forward.

After ten minutes of coffee together, we got a guest to take a picture of us and I promised to see her at least one more time before she decided to call it quits.

It was past 9 pm. I had just wrapped up a customer dinner meeting in Alexandria in Virginia. Common sense would dictate that I drive back to the hotel and hit the sack at my usual 10 pm.
But then I would have missed the chance to meet this unusually nice couple!! So I drove to Maryland to catch up with my one year junior and hostel mate from Engineering days – Singapore and his wife Soumya – who I knew independently thru other friends before they got married!
Sundararajan Thyagarajan is his name. Within a few minutes of he showing up at our hostel, the outstanding thing about him we found out was that he lived in Singapore with his parents forsome time. And that is all it took us to give him the nickname “Singapore “. For 25 years, I had forgotten his real name till he reminded me tonight.
Soumya and I got to know each other thru our dear friend Srimathi who we lost to cancer (she fought the first one off and lost a leg but succumbed to the second one) nearly 15 years back!
Words can’t possibly do justice to the joys of seeing them again and recreating some “intersection points” !!