The bar has always been a place of great conversations.  First night back from vacation was no exception, and maybe, with some perspective, the rule.  I don't always get to participate, hardly to the level I'd like, taking care of the duties that fall upon bar service, but I absorb them, sometimes help them along.  And they are, taken as a whole on in anyway you'd like to, a great thing.

I know, I know, I pooh-pooh them myself sometimes.  But it hardly is the drunken bullshitting or idle joking one might make it out to be.  Opinions are exchanged, jokes are told, but often something real finds it way out from the base of wine talk and travel stories and the sharing of information, like what Bordeaux, the place, as a city, looks like (kind of like "St. Louis, or Houston...")  And I remember people.  Names are hard, but the conversations, the details of 'why I came through DC,' or of occupations far away, such stuff I well remember.  And people sometimes find it surprising.  "That was four years ago!"  It all comes back to me, bit by bit.  And I'm busy enough, staying coordinated, keeping things running, that I don't have to think too much with all this stuff gradually coming out of its recesses in the brain, like a germinating seed growing toward light.

I tend to see a deeper purpose in it all.  I think of how Lincoln once was a barman, a tavern keeper.  And so he could understand, woe unto the world, because of offenses.  He could understand, and the offense cometh.  One long time customer, a pilot, talked about how his father died in a plane crash up in Kodiak Island, Alaska.  "I'm at the same age as when he died," he added, before leaving with our friend Jake.  Good stuff.  Stuff that, if you ask me, leans in upon higher reality.