"Joe Bracchitta, that's B-R-A-C-C-H..."

He used to be a musician, until he fell under the spell of disaster-recovery sales.

That’s why I love writing. Everybody, everywhere has a story. I regularly travel by train between Boston and New York, and there’s always someone interesting to talk to. In the past several months, I’ve met an executive who works for fun at a friend’s tree farm, a lawyer for a terrorist, and my all time favorite: the divorced lawyer and his ex-wife who were coming back from their daughter’s law school graduation. (The lawyer’s latest girlfriend was the same age as his daughter.)

Yesterday it was the disaster-recovery sales guy. If he had told me what he did first off, he might have had a sale. If I could use anything, it would be disaster-recovery insurance. Unfortunately, they don’t offer that to writers, for good reason. But I digress.

He told me the company in first class was generally boring—mostly business people and sales people (and people like me who get bonus upgrades) talking about their kids and “shallow stuff.” Joe clearly doesn’t like pools and golf courses. What he does like is cooking. He learned technique from his mother, but not recipes. He says if you ask his mother for a recipe, the first ingredient is always a big sigh. He cooks the same way—off the cuff, not full of sighs. One gets the impression that his family recipes are full of laughs and smiles, not sighs, the best kind of cooking.

He describes himself as being a Guinea ADD-type of from Yonkers. He got off in New Haven, so I guess you can take the guy out of Yonkers, but you can’t take the Yonkers out of the guy.

Joe and his wife, Lori, recently went on vacation to Italy, a small town outside Rome, to visit family. He said he could have sat the whole time—either watching the world pass by or just watching the world (nature is a wonderful thing if you can find it.) And, guess what? That’s exactly how he spent his vacation. He claimed he wasn’t exaggerating, his wife had to go back to Italy, with his mother, to see the sights. (They left Joe at home.)

As a final note, or coda if you will, Joe and I have an understanding. Even though he ’fessed up to being on the phone with his lawyer while we were on the train, he won’t sue me because I warned him I would be writing this after a couple of glasses of wine. He said he understood, writers being tortured souls and all that. As for Lori, well…hopefully she’s as understanding (and doesn’t have a lawyer on speed dial). Again, the reason why a writer never qualifies for disaster-recovery insurance, but should probably have a disaster-recovery plan…