I Can't Sit Long Enough to Write

The rain is making me crazy. I understand that we live in Paradise and in order for it to stay so beautiful and lush we must have the rain but I need a reprieve. Once, a long long time ago I was hit by a car, and when it rains it feels like my bones are filled with lead, lead that is made of bees, angry bees that sting and bite (okay, I know bees don't bite, but these are lead made biting bees) and weigh me down. It's rained everyday for a week. I want to snap at the raindrops like a nervous dog.

          

Come Onna My Kitchen

I am a waitress. I am a waitress because at some point some years back, when I was still of an age that being a waitress was an acceptable and respectable thing I got a job as a waitress and realized that I was very good at it. Some days. Some days I am the worst waitress in the world and I will forget whether you are drinking sweet or unsweet tea, I will kick your chair when I pass, and I will caress the back of your head with my boob when I lean over you to retrieve your empty plate. You will pretend this did not happen. Hopefully. However, the bad waitress days are few and the good waitress days are plenty and most of the time I love my job. I love my job because I love to walk across a floor, I love to carry many things in my hands, like so many things that I imagine people are noticing and thinking "My! That waitress can carry more things than is humanly possible!". I love to multitask. As I'm pouring water at the server station, my other hand is already reaching for lemon slices and my body is already turning to be in position to pick up a bread basket and I'm thinking about table 12 who needs refills and as soon as I do that I must drop the check on table 3 so that means that I'm calculating the tax in my head, oh 7.5% on a slice of quiche and an iced tea is .68 so that comes to $9.68 and by the time I've thought of that I greet Mrs. Blankenship at the door, "Oh! Hi Mrs. B! How are the cataracts? Has Sally had that baby yet?" and turn and drop drinks and pick up plates and ask if everything's alright and already turning again to bus the plates in my hands, pick up the order for table 8, tell a dirty joke to the grill chef, think about rebrewing the tea, think about the level of the lemons, check the 86 board to see if we're out of something and out the door again to the dining room and smile and smile and smile. If all is going well, and I do my best to make sure everything is going well, it feels like I'm flying. Everyone is happy. I love it when I look around the room and all the diners are smiling. If they aren't, I try to make it so they are by the end of the meal. Maybe I flirt with an old man, maybe I ignore the old man and ask the wife how she's doing and really listen when she tells me her hip hurts. If I go to a table with a very glamorous looking woman and a shy looking woman, maybe I'll tell the shy one that the color of her blouse makes her eyes look amazing. I don't care if the glamorous woman is paying and I may be shorted in my tip,  the shy woman my carry that compliment all day, maybe she'll smile more and the people at her office may smile more back at her. If you open your eyes there are always good things to say to people, and I never lie, or say something just for the money. It makes me feel my job is important, that I make a difference in their lives. The food is not my job. It is the chef's job to make the food taste good. It is my job to make the people able to enjoy the food, and if they do not, fix it. You can't enjoy your food if you are uncomfortable. I'm lucky that I work in a restaurant that does have really tasty food, it makes my job so much easier. If I worked at an Appleby's I would stab myself in the throat.

        Having said all this, I am terrible at fine dining. That is what this restaurant becomes at night so I can't work nights. The money is great, yes, but you can't talk to the customers, you can't laugh. You can't dance. Once, at a restaurant, a manager walked past me while I was getting down while putting sour cream in little plastic cups and said "Stop dancing or your fired". I quit that job. If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your re....staurant.

     I busted my chops in a very different sort of restaurant than where I work now. The man who ran that place had a lot of fire and a lot of passion but very little business sense. Part of my training was to inform me that a "Safety Meeting" was when the staff convened in the walk-in to smoke pot. I did not smoke pot but I liked to cram in there with everyone else and sip a little cold white wine out of a soup cup while the frosty air filled with that beautiful green fragrance and we all calmed down and told jokes. Service was shoot from the hip. We were all expected to develop our own style and develop we did, every table had a very different experience. We tried to match the personalities of the servers with the tables but that didn't always work, the whole place had the feeling of eating on a ship in stormy waters with everyone careening here and there, port to starboard, with the place crewed by children and escaped exotic animals headed for other territories. We were drunk, we were stoned, we were sweaty, but damn if we weren't a family and we did care about the food. I miss that place, I miss the camaraderie we had, but I don't miss coming in to find my fellow server puking out the back of his van or the disher awol because he got arrested the night before. Once the cops actually came to the restaurant and the chef tried to get one of the severs, this sweet little girl from south Florida, to sneak out to the dry storage shed and hide the bong. No, I don't really miss that. But the thing is, I learned there. I learned how to do things on the fly and how to improvise in sticky situations. How to think on my feet and how to, no matter what, make the customer happy.

      Someday I will run my own cafe. I dream of it at night when I'm falling asleep and in the morning over coffee. I think about the good parts of all the places I have worked and I plan how to fit them together into a crazy quilt that could be beautiful and strong. I think about a place that does not careen so much, but does allow room for a bit of listing. A place where the food is good and simple, where everyone gets fed, where you can see the cooks laughing in the kitchen. Someday I will serve my shortbread with coffee, and I will make a mean shepherds pie, I will slice jeweled tomatoes from local gardens onto sandwiches, and I will greet you when you come through the door. And I will encourage all the servers (who will probably be my family and friends and need no encouragement) to dance. Until then, all this is just training.  

         

Everybody Freeze

        Do you remember that game "Freeze" we all used to play in kindergarten? The teacher would play some sort of music and everyone would be instructed to dance until "Freeze!" the music would stop and you were supposed to pause in whatever position you happened to be in at the time. Remember? Remember looking around at all your friends, their google eyes and spider monkey hands hung limp from arms spread wide, hips cocked out, do you remember the stumble of it? Then back into the music, unfreeze. Lately I've been trying to play this game in real life. 

          I've been listening to my Mama and her friends. They say, "Oh, what would you do if you had your thirty year old body back?" they say "It sucks to grow old" and I think about how I have a thirty year old body and I think about how to me, they are not old. But I know what they mean. The years are just wooshing by faster and faster. I get lost in the past sometimes, a smell, a song, and I'm 15 jumping naked into a sinkhole, I'm 20 riding shotgun down those long hot streets of Phoenix with the stereo on full blast, I'm 21 getting married, whoosh I'm 24 getting divorced and getting down and getting a sunburn and getting laid and giddy-up go, and I'm thirty. Thirty is good, I like thirty, but it's true, we don't pause to catch these moments as they pass us. We keep them as memories and they are so shiny, we were always so much prettier back then, more free, more alive. At least that's how we remember it so it must be true.

       So now, I'm playing Freeze. Not all the time, just sometimes. Walking down the street this morning the world was washed clean from last night's thunderstorm. The sky was so blue and the clouds were just flirting, and the sun was gentle on my face and bare shoulders. There were limbs down, the weak and the dead slung from the trees, but this morning the trees were still. So still and the birds were calling, taking inventory of themselves and each other. I pulled limbs out of the road. I thought about the cyclists and the man in the wheelchair and the lady with the walker who all use that sidewalk and I cleared that too. I felt the pings and pangs in my bones as I bent and tugged. I felt the elastic of my muscles and my skin. I paused. There it was, Freeze! Thirty years old, this is what it feels like to be thirty years old, right here so fine, so pretty, so alive. I looked around at the people in their cars with their google eyes and their monkey hands and it was a laugh to see what positions we were all in. Then Unfreeze! and I went on my way, swept up in the crazy music of the morning and the dance to get to work.

I hope I keep this game up. I wonder what position I'll be in next. I wonder what new game I'll learn if I keep listening to those wiser than I am. Till then I'm going to play the music, okay guys? And when the music stops, no matter what position you happen to be in, everybody ...... Freeze!