The Call

"The wand chooses the wizard, Mr. Potter. It's not always clear why. But I think it is clear that we can expect great things from you." Mr.Ollivander (John Hurt), Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001).

I'm that guy.

For almost four years my daughter and I frequented the Rio Grande restaurant on Blake Street for our weekly lunch. We'd tried other places, other genres. We eventually came back to The Rio.

We always ordered the same thing - crab and shrimp enchiladas, a house margarita. The staff knew us, to the point where we were no longer given menus. The margs, and lunch, materialized with nothing but a knowing smile. We once remarked to our server that the day's fare seemed different, the enchiladas more crisp.

"You have discerning palates," he said, chuckling. "They shuffled the line cooks today."

Her life took her first to Detroit, then Baltimore. Still, the downtown Rio remained - a place to meet Wil, Matt, and Michelle, and Michele, Alicia, Jeromy, Jen and Jacob. A place to meet her, and her children, for lunch.

To go for my birthday dinners. The train downtown, a stroll along the Mall and... Crab and shrimp enchiladas.

And the obligatory stop at The Tattered Cover.

We visited The TC last Sunday. My book is no longer on the shelf, having been supplanted by titles that moved more rapidly, Still, it is the holy place. We browsed, we took in the ambiance, and a book beckoned.

What are your five most favorite books? I'll wait...

Is there any commonality? All fiction? Classics? Romance? Favorite author? Me? (Sorry).

On my list is Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Soul of a New Machine (Little, Brown and Company, 1981). It chronicles a group of turbo-geek computer engineers working for a small company in Massachusetts. Kidder's gift isn't merely story telling, it is the way he crafts descriptions of the people involved in the task.

Tom West leads the group - we meet him in the elegant way that a craftsman parcels out sights and sounds. The scene is told from the third person limited point of view - the narrator knows what's going on with some, but not all of the characters. West is a passenger on a sailboat, an enigma told in past tense by those who had observed him. No one saw him sleep, and when the boat encountered heavy weather he was a dynamo of activity and positive energy. He told the others he worked "in computers." Pressed, he reminded them he was on vacation. At the height of the storm he was calm, confident and during a lull went for a long swim. "If this is his idea of a vacation," one person remarked to Kidder,"what must it be like where he works?"

So, when I saw another Kidder book at the Tattered Cover, I picked it up. It was a sequel to his best work, of sorts, but not really. Not everything Kidder has written since Soul has caught more than my momentary attention. But, this book immediately went under my arm. I had to have it. The book. The thing.

It is a book about, among other things, how computer algorithms at the travel site KAYAK help people choose flights, hotels and vacations. About how men and women grew rich feeding the wanderlust of others. Of people like my wife and I.

Oh, hell yeah. But, he had me at hello and I didn't even know it.