Last night we were out for dinner for Father’s Day. So was the rest of the city.

Get this: I had a conversation with a complete stranger.

This happens less than you might think, particularly in Phoenix, a place where we all tend to travel in our own private little bubbles — a byproduct of the car culture.

But Sophie was interested in this woman’s little girl, and vice versa, and before I knew it, two year old Eliza was at our table watching Olivia on the iTouch with Sophie, then Sophie was sitting on Eliza’s mom’s lap, playing with her Droid.

So much for technology inhibiting communication.

By the end of the night, my mother had found out all sorts of personal information about these people (he’s an anesthesiologist, she saw a family friend of ours for counseling after her first marriage fell apart) and my father-in-law had given Eliza her first taste of marzipan.

When the pizza had been eaten and the checks had come and it was almost time to go, Eliza’s mom admitted she’d gotten a “flash of joy” from Sophie when she first saw her. But she said it in a cool way. Really. Turns out she’s a school nurse. She knows kids. But she didn’t know anything about Down syndrome, except that she was over 40 when she had her kids, so it was on her mind for a while, back then.

“She’s so sweet,” she kept saying, looking at Sophie. “What’s her prognosis?”

I told her Sophie reads at grade level, but she’s not so hot at math. I struggled for something else to say. Finally I just looked at her and sort of smiled and said, “We really don’t know.”

Then she told me something really great. She said that when she was pregnant with her kids, she never prayed for them to be healthy. (She’s a hipster, I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear her talk about yoga, but the prayer thing was out of left field; of course, I’d “known” her for 5 minutes.)

Instead, this woman told me, she prayed that she would have the strength to deal with anything that happened.

Amen.