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Back in 1997, when Kimberly and I were planning our move to Boulder, Colo., before I knew anything about the city beyond one hallucinogenic experience in the early 1990s, I drafted to her my dream apartment.

We were sitting at the kitchen table in her ancestral home in Summerfield, the house she had moved into after relocating from Rhode Island two years before. A visitor's guide to Boulder lay flat on the table, next to a couple of glasses of red wine.

I invoked the home of my imagination. It will be a second-floor apartment, I said, with windows that look down on a busy city street. Below us will be a sushi bar. We'll spend our nights drinking Asahi beer and eating sushi and yakitori.

A few months later, after we arrived at our destination, reality sunk in. I quickly realized that particular dream was set in the wrong city. Boulder was no New York, no San Francisco. There were no skyscrapers. There were no weaving streets of mixed-use development. We found a basement apartment with high windows in a quiet neighborhood that allowed us miniature views of the towering Front Range mountains. But just a few blocks away was a sushi restaurant, and every once in a while I'd find myself sitting in a booth at that restaurant, nibbling on salmon and tuna nigiri and drinking a 22-ounce Sapporo.

Cut to eight years later. We're in Winston-Salem. Our second son, Luca, was born the night before. It's 7 p.m. at Forsyth Hospital, and our baby is fast asleep in the hospital-issue cradle, and his brother is spending the night at his grandparents' house. A fatigued Kimberly tells me to go grab some dinner, to get something nice. I drive a few miles to my local sushi bar, drink a beer, eat my dinner and meditate on the newest child to enter my life's revolution.

What is it about sushi? Why that? Why not some other food, such as steak or tacos or pork chops?

When Sage was just a baby, I narrated another dream to Kimberly. I can't wait, I said, until he's older and I can take him to a sushi bar.

We waited until the boys were at least 3 before we let them try sushi. Sage hated it. Luca experimented, but just a bit. I felt my dream fading, started to imagine instead the punk rock band I'd start with the boys once they were teenagers.

But then it happened. Two months ago, I brought a package of sushi home from the grocery store. The boys stared at my dinner with curiosity. Sage grabbed one piece, and then Luca followed. I watched in awe as, within minutes, they had ravenously eaten all of my dinner. I forgot all about my rock 'n' roll dreams.

Last weekend, to celebrate Sage and Luca finishing another year of school, we decided to go out to eat (and to give Kimberly a much-deserved break). I loaded the boys in the minivan, and we drove the seven minutes to our local sushi restaurant. We grabbed a table outside. I let Sage order. He asked for tuna and yellowtail, crab and shrimp. We talked about our summer plans, about mosquitoes, skateboards and, more importantly, skateboard ramps.

Our waiter delivered our food, and the boys chomped away. Large chunks of rice slipped from Luca's chopsticks and fell to the ground. Soy sauce dripped from Sage's mouth. They drank fruit punch like two wanderers rescued from the Sahara desert. I ate, but more than that, I watched and I reveled in that tiny moment, in that small but so vital experience: dinner with my boys.

Not all dreams are large, but every one of them when reached brings us that much closer to the life we were meant to live, to the people we were meant to be. We paid our check and I left a parent tip -- 20 percent plus a few dollars more to cover the added clean-up time.

As we drove home, the Echo and the Bunnymen song "The Killing Moon" played on the radio. Ian McCulloch sang: "Fate/Up against your will/Through the thick and thin/He will wait until/You give yourself to him." I thought again of Summerfield, of that night more than a dozen years ago, when I first walked into that tiny house off U.S. 220.

Earlier that evening I had been at a Sufi restaurant in Chapel Hill. I was about to start driving west, to see how far $1,000 in savings would take me. A mystic was there, and I told him of my plans through a translator. He responded that I wasn't ready to go, that there were things here waiting for me.

I remembered a conversation Kimberly and I had a few months before. We joked that we should spend three days together, that after those three days we'd either fall in love or hate each other. I called her from a friend's home and, two hours later, appeared at her door.

I stayed for three days. I stayed for a lifetime.

Dreams crossing paths with reality. Small ones and large ones, and all of them are intertwined together. We rarely see it as we muddle and move through time, through our responsibilities and our daily struggles, but our lives are magical, and all moments, ultimately, are fated.

 

"Saturdays With Sage" runs monthly in Go Triad. Contact Vishal Khanna at vckhanna@juno.com.

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