I often, well, like, ask myself, what is the son of a proper college professor doing in a wine bar.  What is a writer, a proper one, doing working a bar.  Answers might flood in.  A.  wine.  B.  people.  C.  the stories and lore and meaningful trivia that people, with the help of wine, and my team's service, share.  D. which amount to world travels.

It's helpful to hear that it is a plausible scenario, the bartender who is a writer, moreso, a wise and seasoned friend says, than the actor bartender.  I can see that.  Different honing of craft.  Chekhov would have loved the bar, as much as he loved theater.  The bar would have been one of his assumptions, without which no society could work or be worth writing about, unless there were some magical way of communing, an instituted weekly evening like church, but liberal and free.

Visions from one night.  A wine maker from the Northern tip of Michigan making old world style Reisling, a veteran of family restaurant.  Cherry trees and now vines in old Hemingway country.   A deep deep friend who cannot be mentioned as if she were just a rote fact, an appearance, one of those who bring home the great connectedness, an educator who took me for my first visit the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum, who has arrived with a troop of souls the gentle prophetic being inside each one of us immediately recognizes and loves or the other way around.

Who cares about the newest restaurant.  Who gives a ... about the latest.  Good for talk, just to establish some basic agreement, that eating good is better.

An iPhone cannot be a bar.  It cannot be a bar of the civilized sort that is, like the reading room of a great and generous library, a place, a forum of discussion, of questions like, 'what are you reading these days,' and answers.  There are meetings, totemic, real, mythical, pedestrianly consumer, though each one bears a possibility.

A staff member reads a popular mens magazine, and reports on a column, a bartender giving advice, answering questions.  From what I heard today he does not sound like a very good one.  A woman looks into her family history at a website, Ancestry.Com, let's say.  Mens Health Journal professional advice, as relayed by staff member, helpful wife of male who reads said magazine:  'who cares? live your own life.  who cares if you're related to...'  That a professional bartender would say such a thing, offer such as advice, strikes me as anti-cultural, anti-intellectual, and maybe vaguely criminal as far as the job of tending the people who come to bar, curating the inherent conversational aspects.  Shame on such.  And maybe, with such fine examples, of the I Don't Give A Shit Attitude, are reasons why a decent service is sometimes sneered upon and belittled.  Is this why whatever magazine publishes the voice of such an idiot, for splash, for quick pop as if to advertise and support that idiot bartender whose only real job is to pitch a certain product, offer an Amaretto Di Saronno on the rocks, or Miller Lite in the new bottle.  If that is the only task of the bartender, God help us.


Enough of social commentary.

A man, who is a cyclist, reports his father has died at one hundred years of age.  Cleaning out the house, the finding of a small pamphlet, A GI's guide to Northern Italy.  There was much stuff in the family house.

Our friend from Colorado has just ridden the Ride of the Rockies.  Bravo.  The younger son is engaged now too.  First, for the oldest one's wedding in Philly.  The younger, will be a year later, marrying a Sikh.  Asked of the format for the first, Jewish, our friend responds, I've done my best not to raise my children Christian.  And it works.

But what is there to do?  Where is there guidance for young people, for seekers of meaning and 'truth?' There isn't much in the way of direction now, or purpose, beyond 'faster, more,' or 'apps.'