Triple door opens wide

You know, the one with the triple door,” she says. I’m in trouble. Not yet six months here, still a green student getting used to ...

You know, the one with the triple door,” she says. I’m in trouble. Not yet six months here, still a green student getting used to American accents, and this woman makes no sense to me. She has called to ask me out. She has suggested a restaurant I don’t know. So she says: “The one with the triple door.” Triple door? What’s that? Why would a restaurant have one anyway?

Feel for me. Yes, I’m new to America, to the delight of an attractive young lady asking me out. I want to seem cool, like this has happened a hundred times (it hasn’t, not once). Yet I am baffled by what she says, nervous about admitting as much. Not cool at all. “I don’t know,” I say hesitantly, “any restaurant with a triple door.” She laughs, slows for breath, and gasps: “Not triple, silly! Pripple! Pripple.” Enlightenment? Not yet! It has a “pripple” door? But then I say it out loud — well, not so loud, just a whisper so she won’t hear me — and it makes sense. “Purple.” Ah. But in her succulent, curvaceous, fruity Noo Yawk accent: “Pripple.”

Restaurant with the purple door, yes. On Wickenden Street. Now I know it. She keeps laughing. On the phone. When I ring her bell to pick her up. All the way there in my rattletrap Dodge. Sure it’s funny, but this isn’t the best start to our date. At any rate, it is doing some damage to my still fresh-off-the-boat ego.

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Nevertheless, dinner is fun. The restaurant is cheery, friendly waitresses and clientele. Company’s good, food too. Best of all, a guitar man is singing. Several tuneful standards — Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne, Paul Simon, Joan Baez. I lap it up, thinking this is America! This is the American life, this cozy restaurant, these songs that have only ever been tracks on albums to me. Then he finishes a tune and asks, “Any requests?”

I have one. He has been singing Joan Baez, surely he’ll know this tune that she sings so well? You know, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord”? So I call out — getting the hang of being American, aren’t I? — “Battle Hymn of the Republic, please!”

There’s a moment of silence. Then a familiar sound starts up and has soon swept the entire room. Laughter. Like I heard trilling on the phone, then in the car. The whole damn place is laughing at me. Guitar man drawls, “You from the South, man?” As I wait for a hole to swallow me up, I notice one person isn’t laughing. In the same fruity accent, she explains the Civil War significance of the song; why it’s odd, at best, to request it in a restaurant in this heart of Yankee America.

Months later, I realise this was the moment the green student feeling started wearing off. To this day, I’m grateful to her for that. Triply grateful, even.