There's this pizza joint I go to every now and again. Nothing fancy - good pies, cold beer, and one of those bars where you can park yourself while you wait for your order. The kind of place where you can sit for twenty minutes without anyone hassling you, nursing a pint and watching whatever sport happens to be on the telly.
I'm friendly. Perhaps overly so, if you ask Dimi. But I've always been on the lookout for sparky individuals - the switched-on types who've got something going on behind their eyes. Call it a character flaw or call it curiosity, but I find myself drawn into conversations with strangers more often than most people probably should.
About four years back, the bartender that night was exactly that kind of sparky. Mid-twenties, maybe. Sharp. Quick with a joke but not in that rehearsed hospitality way - more like someone who was genuinely enjoying the exchange. The kind of person who makes you forget you're just waiting for pizza.
Somewhere between my first and second beer (the pizza was running late, as it tends to do on Friday nights), I asked him what his deal was. Not in a nosy way - just the natural flow of conversation when you're two blokes with nothing better to do for fifteen minutes.
"Trying to get into the ADF," he said, and there was something in the way he said it that made me pay attention. Not hope, exactly. More like resolve. "There's a specific role I'm going for. Been at it for a while now."
I asked what role, and he told me, and I could see immediately that this wasn't some backup plan or something to do until something better came along. This was the thing. The thing he'd set his compass towards.
I encouraged him to stick with it. Told him a bit about where I was at - Chloe deep in her swimming, Lachs navigating the later years of school, Dim with her new horse taking up every spare moment. Just normal stuff. The kind of life inventory you share with strangers at bars because it doesn't really matter and it somehow matters completely.
The pizza arrived. I paid, grabbed my boxes, and headed out into the night, filing his name somewhere in the grey matter alongside a thousand other brief encounters that might or might not mean anything down the track.
For the next two years, he was off and on at the same place. Not every time I went in - sometimes there'd be a different face behind the bar, and I'd wonder briefly if he'd shipped out or given up or just found a better-paying gig somewhere else. But then I'd wander in a month later and there he'd be, pulling beers and remembering my name.
And we'd talk. About his application, mostly. The ADF recruitment process is not for the faint of heart - it's a long road of tests and interviews and medical checks and waiting. So much waiting. His application was moving forward, then it wasn't, then it was again. He'd be in great shape one month, talking about his training regime. The next time I'd see him, he'd have let it slip a bit - the frustration of the delays wearing him down around the edges.
But here's the thing that stuck with me: he was always facing the same direction. Happy or not happy, in shape or out of shape, moving forward or stuck in bureaucratic limbo - his compass never wavered. He never talked about backup plans or alternative careers or what he might do if this didn't work out. There was only ever the one thing.
And he'd always remember to ask about my family. "How's the daughter's swimming going?" or "Did your son figure out what he's doing after school?" Little details from conversations we'd had months before, filed away in his own grey matter. It wasn't hospitality politeness. It was genuine human interest, the kind that makes you feel like you matter to someone, even if you're just the pizza bloke who shows up every few weeks.
And then, last year, I wandered in on what turned out to be his very last shift.
He was behind the bar, same as always, but there was something different about him. Lighter, maybe. Like someone who'd finally put down a weight they'd been carrying for years.
"Tomorrow," he said, before I even had a chance to order. "I ship out tomorrow."
I'm not going to pretend I didn't get a little emotional. Four years of watching this guy push towards something, never giving up, never letting the setbacks knock him off course - and here it was. The finish line. Or, more accurately, the starting line of the thing he'd been training for all along.
I bought him a beer (against all bar protocol, probably) and told him how genuinely proud I was of him. Wished him the absolute best and told him to stay in touch, knowing full well that neither of us would, because that's not how these things work. Some connections are meant to be temporary, brief intersections of two lives heading in different directions.
I grabbed my pizza and walked out, figuring that was the end of the story.
Fast forward to yesterday. A full year has passed.
My own son has graduated from his bootcamp journey with the Navy - a milestone I could barely have imagined when I first met the bartender all those years ago. My wife is progressing with her career, finding her stride in ways that make me proud every single day. My daughter has just moved to Dallas to swim for SMU, chasing her own dreams on the other side of the world.
And me? I went out to grab a pizza for myself. Solo mission. Dimi was at the barn, the house was quiet, and I was craving pepperoni and solitude.
I walked into the joint, ordered at the counter, and parked myself at the bar to wait.
You can probably see where this is going.
I didn't recognise him at first. The guy sitting three stools down was both slimmer and bigger than the bartender I remembered - the paradox of military training that strips away the soft stuff while building something harder underneath. His posture was different. The way he held himself. There was an iron in his spine that hadn't been there before.
But then he turned, and those same sparky eyes met mine, and a grin broke across his face.
"Pizza guy!"
We talked for the entire wait. He'd made it through. Not just survived boot camp, but thrived. Got the role he'd been chasing. Was home on leave, visiting old haunts, maybe looking for a bit of the life he'd left behind.
And as I sat there listening to him talk about where he'd been and where he was going, I couldn't help but think about the improbability of it all. Four years of brief encounters, pizza-length conversations, a running commentary on two lives that had nothing to do with each other except for this one recurring intersection at a bar in Sydney.
He asked about Chloe and Lachs and Dimi, remembered all of it, and I filled him in on the year that had been. Two strangers, catching up like old friends, over a pizza that was taking too long again.
Change happens. That's the lesson, I suppose, if there needs to be one.
Sometimes it happens so slowly that you don't even notice it until an epoch passes and you're looking back at who you were and barely recognising that person. Other times it happens all at once, a single moment that divides your life into before and after.
But mostly, change is just the accumulation of days. The small decisions made over and over again. The compass held steady through the frustrations and the setbacks and the times when it would be so much easier to just give up and do something else.
That bartender taught me something without ever meaning to. He showed me what it looks like to want something badly enough to wait for it. To keep showing up, keep pushing, keep that compass pointed true north even when the destination feels impossibly far away.
I think about him sometimes when I'm out on an early morning run and my legs are complaining and the finish line is nowhere in sight. I think about those years behind the bar, pulling beers and waiting for a phone call, never wavering from the thing he knew he was meant to do.
Every day you've gotta keep your compass aligned with where you want to go.
Congrats, mate. You chased down that dream. And somewhere along the way, you reminded a middle-aged pizza enthusiast what persistence actually looks like.