The last group, a party of women back in the wine room, are getting up to go off into the warm night after a pleasant mom's night out, just as I sit down to eat a chicken sausage and onion on Ezekial bread English Muffin. The four top that sat down five of ten to have dinner (the kitchen closing at ten) have passed on dessert, thank god, and have left with a pleasant word and a handshake. It's been a fine Spring evening, a wine tasting night, two Cotes Du Rhone Villages from the village of Sablet, just south of Gigondas, a white and a red, provided by our long time friend and great awesome guy in general, Sotiris. But at six hours into it, I sit down at the bar, open my iPhone, propped against a bottle of mineral water, and pretend something of interest might appear. It's time to eat. A lot of talk with regulars, a lot of movement, a busy night, a little Van Morrison playing later in the evening, a Pandora station that seems well-regulated.

So I'm eating, pondering, as John Prine says in a song, "wondering if his life was a terrible mistake," (to rhyme with "Grandpa's on the front porch staring at a rake..."), and there is something sacred to eating uninterrupted, even if you're by yourself sitting at the bar. "Does he work here?" one of the ladies asks another a bit like I didn't exist, as they see now that they are the last ones in a restaurant. And it seems one of them nods back to her, 'yes, he does,' to reassure her. But, somewhat rudely, I don't immediately offer a farewell, and nor do the seven of them. No "enjoy your dinner, sir," but maybe I look to Washingtonian wives too much out of Dostoevsky to engage at this hour of the day. The other guy waited on them. And they did tip well. The busboy is gone, leaving me to pick up the water glasses, the dirty napkins, the place mates, the separate check credit card tickets. Good night. And so the night descends into a solitary state, a non-entity after my twenty four years in hospitality as the friendly neighborhood barman who can converse on a variety of subjects, and sometimes even witty.

My father was a man of science, in a great old school way that embraced the broadest range of biology and beyond from classical times to the modern instant. I should have been a scientist, not a stupid English major, left to toil with no practical applicable expertise, but quietly and obscurely, 'on the side,' as they say. Oh well, Chekhov had it sort of the same way, but of course he had medicine and seems a competent doctor of his day and a wonderful gardener too.

I get my butt home on the bicycle. The town is very quiet, this part of town anyway, and indeed I take a turn past the old 19th Century cemetery on the way. The birds are up still, here and there. And close to home, a hydrant is opened to spill water prodigiously along Sheridan Circle and running down along the curb in front of the Turkish Ambassador's magnificent and newly renovated residence. Bright lights and beeping backhoe and a construction crew is up to something, digging across from the mouth of the little street. The cat, taking into the vet earlier with a condition of a bleeding anus, has recovered from her enema treatment, and spends a bit of time out in the night air on the front stoop and a roll around on the sidewalk for territorial good measure after I get my bicycle in the door, get my helmet off and unsling my courier bag. I crack open a Guinness before administering her liquid medication. And I will be up for a few more hours, but too spent to write or read anything, as a professional really should do when coming home from work, finding solace in Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares, as if I couldn't escape the world of restaurant service.

Kitchen Nightmares turns out to be excellent television, a service to humanity. A restaurant is often family, as in 'family-owned and operated.' And it takes a chef, a fellow like Ramsey, to get a family talking, to get them to open up, to not hide matters, to get things out into the open where they have not been spoken of, where people have refused to speak of them. An earnest son apologizes for saying something disrespectful of his family's business, allowing life and work to go onward, no longer caught in unspoken turmoil. Not a bad way to end the evening, if a lesson is gained from it.

In the great understanding of the Buddha mind where all that is possible is understood one wonders of his own stuff, his own failure to communicate, his failure to be life Chef Ramsey and face the issue before him honestly, to not hide in the usual psychological configurations/call it what you will. To not aid and abet cover-ups, the polite lies, the deeper hidden festering disagreements and unhealthy stuff. Whatever it is, it's your life and you got to go on with it. You have to make decisions like a grown-up.

Ask yourself how you have fared with that.