Local Karma
Yesterday I spent the day riding at Ajax. At around 1:00 we stopped back at my truck for a lunch, and then headed back up the hill to board Life 1A again. At the top parking lot, an scruffy looking Italian man was trying mercilessly to back his Ford Explorer out of the snow. He was revving like mad, but only his right rear was spinning. My buddy Noah and I stopped to help by pushing the front end of his vehicle while he mashed the pedal in reverse.
“I don’t think you’re in 4 wheel, man.” Noah, a mechanic by trade, said to the guy.
“Yes, the light is on,” he replied.
We pushed and pushed but could not get him out. As much as I wanted to help, I had to admit that I still wanted to snowboard some more, and time was wasting. Noah and I wished the man good luck, and he thanked us, as we boarded the lift for a few more runs.
Almost two hours later, we came back down to end the day. To our surprise, there were now TWO Italians and TWO stuck vehicles!! They were shoving all kinds of things under the rear wheel: blankets, plywood, shovels. Everything went flying under the wheel and out the front with each try.
I ran up to the men and yelled “STOP! Let me get my truck, and I will pull you both out in seconds!”
“Thank you, thank you,” they replied.
Within minutes, I had yanked out the Explorer with a slight tap on the pedal in granny gear. The other vehicle, a Jeep Wrangler with big AT tires (yeah, how did he get stuck?) was a different story. As I pulled against him, he was sliding laterally towards the minivan parked next to him. When he was within inches of a collision, I unhooked my truck and told him I didn’t want to be liable for damaging the minivan.
“Yes, I am calling this guy now,” he said.
“Wait, you know whose van this is?” I asked.
“Yes, this belongs to my boss.”
“Well, shit! You definetly don’t want to hit it!” I exclaimed in surprise.
Regardless, the two gentlemen were extremely grateful, and thanked both of us multiple times.
“Come down to our restaurant. Have a drink on us,” they kept saying. One was a manager, and the other a cook, at a fancy Italian place in town.
I took down the information, but I wasn’t very serious about going there.
Later that evening, Vanessa arrived at my house. On a whim, I asked her “How would you like to go to a nice Italian dinner in Aspen?”
“Okay,” she replied.
We drove back downtown that evening, and after getting lost a few times, finally found the restaurant, L’Hostaria. We walked down some stairs through a small courtyard and entered the restaurant.
As I assumed any nice restaurant in town to be on Saturday night, the place was packed with people. I spoke to the hostess and she told me that the dining room would be a long wait, and she put our name on the list for a bar table.
Suddenly the manager, Fabrizio, came around the corner and greeted me with a smile and a handshake. We exchanged small talk for a few seconds, and then he was quickly distracted by work duties. He was talking to his hostess, picking up the phone, looking through the reservation book, talking to the wine guy, picking up the phone again, looking through the book again. I figured he had forgotten all about us.
About five minutes since we shook hands, he put down the phone, turned around, and said to me “Adam, are you on the list?”
“Yeah, we are waiting on a bar table, but I’d like something a little more romantic for my girlfriend,” I told him with a grin.
“Hang, I will see what I can do.”
He disappeared and reappeared in seconds, grabbed two menus, and said “follow me.”
We were seated immediately, and I shook his hand again and said thank you.
Although I was more than happy with the treatment, the generosity did not stop there. Before we could order our wine, a large plate of calimari was brought to our table! Vanessa, who was very hungry, was in awe of her boyfriend’s connections, as she dug into the fried appetizer.
A few minutes later, Rueben, the cook with the Explorer, came out and said hello. He promised to cook up a wonderful meal for us.
He wasn’t kidding. Although I witnessed our server take multiple orders before ours, our plates appeared before we could even sip our wine!
Through the whole night, I felt like I was in the movie “Goodfellas“. The average clientel of the upscale Aspen restaurant consisted of wealthy jet-setters and travelling connoisseurs. However, last night a young working-class guy was able to treat his girl to a night of celebrity status, all because of some good Karma at the base of Aspen Mountain earlier that day.