What a great Valentine’s Day that was, our 40th. Dinner at El Cacerio in Silver Lake. Called earlier to double check on our reservation made weeks ago. They didn’t have it. Said they’d called yesterday and I didn’t answer so they gave our place to someone else. I didn’t remember any call except our Uber driver. But that wasn’t our Uber driver, it was the restaurant. The Uber driver had been about to call, saw us and hung up before dialing. How was I to know. Anyway, we got a 9 pm reservation instead, but as we were speaking a cancellation came through Yelp on her iPad for 8:30 and we took that. Yelp texted my iPhone. I had to download the app which I didn’t realize I hadn’t done yet. A few buttons pushed and the app was downloaded, I dragged it into the folder with all the other dining apps and opened it, accepted the reservation verification and closed the app. Yelp texted me again, telling me the reservation was set. Then I opened up the Uber app, then the Lyft app and compared fares, closed Lyft, typed El Caserio into the Uber destination field, the app populated the destination info for me, arranged a car, which arrived and drove us past the lake which glimmered with an analog beauty in the moonlight, dropped us off at the restaurant and took payment for the ride from our bank account via PayPal. The maitre d’ found our reservation on his iPad and we were whizzed off to table for a meal that was delicious and terribly romantic in its lack of high technologies until I paid with an ATM card.

Forty years ago on our first Valentine’s Day we ate at a place called Hal’s off Upper State in Santa Barbara. The only thing that meal had in common with tonight was that we ate our food with a knife and fork. I’d called in a reservation on our rotary phone and my name was written in pencil on a pad of paper next to their rotary phone. Not only did we do none of the other internet driven preliminaries forty years ago, but none of them were actually possible because none of the technologies had been invented or even imagined yet, not even on Star Trek. The hours before dinner were rendered empty. We probably spent all that time screwing.