Occasionally, a random but striking event occurs that some people might describe as having a hidden meaning or suggest “was meant to be.” My problem is determining the hidden meaning, or who (or what) meant it to be and why.

Recently, I was returning from a 4:45 a.m. airport drop-off in Hartford, with New England dark and cold on every side, not wanting to return to bed (too much coffee already), and knowing it was too early for most restaurants. My body refused to consider a workout at the Y, so I chose to stop at one of the last of a breed: a 24-hour diner at a truck stop.

There were a few trucks at the pumps, but no cars at the diner and no one visible inside, even though bright lights beamed through the plate glass windows. But soon after entering, the night manager appeared, poured coffee, and took my order.

Soon, I was buried in reading this newspaper (online), when a youngish (to me) server arrived and began cleaning and prepping behind the counter. She wasn’t chipper, but she seemed sanguine about beginning the 6 a.m. shift.

When two even younger men (late teens, early 20s?) entered, I realized we might have been models for Edward Hopper’s 1942 “Nighthawks” painting (often interpreted as illustrating loneliness and self-reflection caused by the economic Depression and World War II) in a fishbowl of plate glass. Our appearance was a bit more modern, since the men weren’t wearing suits, ties, and fedoras, and the server’s company T-shirt showed tattoos down an arm and up her neck.

We exchanged small talk as she poured coffee, and later realized she was talking to the manager, seated at the counter with the cook, all wearing the same T-shirts. She wrote something on the back of her order pad, although both seemed to have what they needed.

When she returned, she asked, out of the blue, “What is love?” I was so stunned that I asked her to repeat herself, which she did, saying she was looking for a one-word answer. “I already asked them and they said, ‘Disappointment’ and ‘It doesn’t exist.’”

“Are you going to write about it?”

“No, I’m just going to ask a bunch of people today, and then think about it.”

I sensed that, right then, she was completely earnest and guileless, and afterward realized that she posed a question poets, philosophers, psychologists, and religious thinkers had been pondering for hundreds of years, although none answered with a single word. Shakespeare used many of his 154 sonnets addressing the question, and generations of authors around the world have done the same.

But as unexpected as it was at the time, it seemed a fair question.

As an old man with white hair, who observed the 1967 Summer of Love and watched it devolve into extensive drug abuse and the violence at the Stones’ festival in Altamont a year later, I felt duty-bound to provide an answer in the harsh light of the Hopper diner, especially after the previous responses.

My aged brain turned to the warmth and deep glow of ash-covered embers rather than the wild sparks and flames of my youth. I explained that I’ve been in love, and still am, which didn’t seem to surprise her. After a bit of searching, I came up with the word “devotion,” explaining that all relationships face challenges, “bumps in the road,” but that devoted love can conquer them all. She wrote down my one-word answer, and returned to her work.

As I was leaving, she described a type of love in which all are one, and is characterized by seeing yourself in others. I simply nodded and we wished each other a nice day. But I couldn’t resist suggesting to her that defining “love” might be a bit like the quote from a court case trying to define “pornography” (later found to be from 1964 Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart): The judge couldn’t define it in words, “but I know it when I see it.”

Love is a many-splendored thing, with too many manifestations to define in a word, sentence or paragraph. “But,” I told her, “I think you know it when you feel it or see it.”

And so, I left the Hopper painting, thinking of the line from “The Sounds of Silence:” “the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls.” Or maybe posed as a question in a surprising moment in an unlikely place.

Allen Woods is a freelance writer, author of the Revolutionary-era historical fiction novel “The Sword and Scabbard,” and Greenfield resident. His column appears regularly on Saturdays. Comments are welcome here or at awoods2846@gmail.com.