One Of My Most Glaring Regrets

It’s 2003, I’m playing music at the Tin Fish – a seafood restaurant that sits at the end of the Imperial Beach Pier in San Diego.  Severe depression has set in, along with horrible anxiety.  While playing at the pier, I experience some hostility from some of the customers.  While it was fairly rare, it seemed to me at the time, to be constant.  Besides the hostility at the pier, I ended up getting two chicken shit traffic tickets on two separate occasions, while on the way to playing.  Anyway, one day I’m playing, and at some point an older woman and a young girl – she appears to be about 11 years old – appear there, they are sitting on a bench – not a lunch table, but a bench that was up against the railing of the wooden pier.  On my break, I walk over in their direction, and the older woman stops me, says hi, that they are enjoying my music, and then introduces me to her niece, Victoria.  Victoria is a very well mannered girl, dressed conservatively – as opposed to so many at her age who dress with as little clothing as possible, with disrespect and anger written all over them.  I sit and talk with them for a few minutes, then I go into the restaurant to get a cup of hot chocolate.  I go up to play another set, and on my next break, they’re still there – sittin on the bench.  The woman comes to me and asks if she could buy me a hot chocolate, and I kind of zombie-like accept.  A couple of people who I knew showed up about then, and when the woman came back with my hot chocolate, I also zombie-like sat down at the table where the people I knew were.  I wasn’t talking to any of them, and they weren’t talking to me.  I don’t know what the hell I was thinking, but Victoria and her aunt were sitting just a few feet away from me – off to the side, still on the bench.  I’m sitting there with nothing on my mind, blindly staring off at the sky and the ocean.  After a few minutes of this, Victoria’s aunt comes over to me and says, “We’ll see you later”, and they walk away.  This has haunted me ever since, I feel like I was rude and unfeeling towards Victoria and her aunt.  They didn’t deserve for me to ignore them – even though I didn’t do it knowingly, in fact, I was off in some other world, and to this day, I don’t know what they hell got into me right then.  Victoria and her aunt were very pleasant people from the couple of minutes that I did spend with them on the earlier break, so I cannot figure out why I was so unthinking and unaware of them being there.  I know I made them feel bad, and I wish I could find them so I can apologize.  Probably too little too late, and they probably wouldn’t even remember me or what happened, but still.  I’m sure I’ll never see them again, so this will continue to haunt me every time it enters my mind.

My motto is if I’m going to be rude to somebody, it better be with damn good reason – and there was no good reason for me to be rude to Victoria and her aunt.  I’m so sorry, and if you should, by some fluke, find this page, please know that that day is one I could take back and do again.

Lee