If random matchmakers got Yelp reviews, Pamela Grace and Arnim Ludwig Kaiser would give five stars to the waitress who served them on October 11, 2022, at Le Plaza-La Paillotte, a restaurant in Arles, France. However, a half-star deduction for one too many table visits may be warranted.
Mrs. Grace and Mr. Kaiser were both out of town dining alone when Mrs. Grace, 80, got up to leave and felt unsteady. Mr. Kaiser, 79, sitting near his table, invited her to sit for a moment. “It was the first time he asked a strange woman to his table and the first time I ever sat down with a man I didn’t know,” said Mrs. Grace.
The waitress, she said, “watched the entire interaction with a smile on her face.”
“I believe that this fine young woman was not long in seeing this old man and this old woman who had come in alone, sitting together,” said Mrs. Grace.
In a first swipe at their table, the waitress reinforced the sense of compatibility by noting that they had ordered the same dinner — salmon followed by a crème brûlée with local lavender. But at a subsequent check-in he interrupted Mr. Kaiser’s mid-conversation. “He leaned in to ask if we’d like anything else, and Arnim just said, ‘My wife.’ Because of the interruption, he “never got to finish his thought.”
Ms. Grace returned to her hotel that night assuming that Mr. Kaiser was “a nice, honest European” who was happily married, she said. Only a few days later, when she returned home to Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and he to Gernsbach, Germany, he would learn that he was a widower.
Ms. Grace, a retired assistant professor of film studies at Brooklyn College who earned a Ph.D. in film studies from NYU at age 60, is a longtime member of the New York committee of Human Rights Watch. Her trip to France in 2022 was for a Human Rights Watch summit. He grew up in Watertown, New York and graduated from Manhattanville College with a BA in English. earned a master’s degree in social work from Columbia.
Mr. Kaiser, who had traveled to Arles for a photography workshop, has a doctorate in social sciences from the University of Bonn in Germany and later served as chairman of the humanities faculty at the Bundeswehr University in Munich, where he is now. retired. He grew up in Saarbrücken, Germany and has a degree in Romance languages and literature from the University of Bonn.
Ms. Grace divorced in 2002. She has two children and a 15-year-old grandson. Mr Kaiser lost his wife to liver cancer in 2019 after 53 years of marriage. He has no children.
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When they first saw each other at Le Plaza-La Paillotte, Mr. Kaiser had greeted Mrs. Grace as he sat down at a table next to her with a hearty “bonsoir.” She was fascinated. “How sweet, I thought,” she said. “Someone who doesn’t treat his colleagues as furniture.” After inviting her to sit down and learning she was American, he struck up a conversation in English over a glass of rosé.
“It was the first time I had feelings for someone” since he was widowed, he said. Before saying a final “bonsoir” that evening, they exchanged email addresses. Mrs. Grace wrote first.
“I hadn’t heard from him for a few days and I was thinking, you know, I kind of like this guy,” he said. After a week’s correspondence, however, he became agitated. “One day he said to me, ‘Arnim, I don’t know how to handle this situation. We write very personal emails. What does your wife say about us having such a strong relationship?”
By the end of the year they were in love. “I was always checking my email to see if he had written to me, as a teenager,” Ms Grace said. But “then came another hurdle,” Mr. Kaiser said. She invited him to visit her in New York in January 2023. He had never flown before, preferred to travel by train or car, and felt unprepared to begin. “I wasn’t stressed,” he said. “But I don’t like it when I can’t handle a situation.”
He flew to Germany instead. Four weeks later, they returned to New York together, a committed couple. By the end of the year, they were going back and forth between New York and Germany every three months, each spending four weeks with the other.
In December 2023, Mr. Kaiser proposed at a candlelit dinner in his Gersbach apartment.
“I never thought I’d want to get married again,” she said. “But I was so excited.”
On March 15, they gathered 26 guests for a wedding at her Fort Greene apartment. Jane Croft, a Universal Life Church priest Ms. Grace found through an internet search, conducted a short ceremony.
The couple plans to spend half the year in Brooklyn and half in Europe. Everyone feels familiar with each other’s homeland now. But their delight in finding each other still feels new.
“I did not know or believe that such feelings would ever return,” Mr. Kaiser said.