Had Said

Hi, my understanding of how to use the past perfect has always been you should have a temporal point of reference in the past (with exceptions in the historic present). With the two examples of the past perfect (in red) in the passage below, I don't perceive any particular point of reference. Bob used the past constantly up to here, and all of a sudden, thump!, past perfect. Why do you think he used 'had said' suddenly? What sense, if there is at all, does it impart to the readers?

When we were in our early fifties my phone at work rang, and it was Jack, calling from a New York street on his cell phone. He said he was on the corner of Lexington and Forty-third.

There was a man on that corner, he said --- a man selling very old Life magazines from a makeshift stand he had set up. The vintage Lifes were going for twenty dollars apiece.

Jack was in New York on business. He had appointments to keep. And --- knowing how much I had always loved Life --- he said, over the miles: "What years do you want? I already had the guy give me the week you were bron, but what other years do you want?"

"How much money do you have with you?" I asked."

"I can go to the bank," he said. "What years do you want?"

He was busy. But he stood on the New York corner and described the covers to me: "There's Donna Reed, from nineteen fifty-three ...," he said.

We spent ten minutes on the phone as he went through the old Lifes. And then, four hours later, he called me back. "All right, I went and got some money," he said. "I'm back at the guy's table." He was devoting a good part of his day to this. "There's Frank Sinatra Sr. and Frank Sinatra Jr. from nineteen sixty-three .... Here's the astrounauts. Do you want that one?"

"Listen," I had said to him, "you're spending a lot of time on this."

"That's all right," he'd said. "How many times am I going to run into a guy selling the magazines you've been looking for?"

And in Manhattan he started up again, flipping through covers.

('And You Know You Should Be Glad' by Bob Greene)