We hadn't seen our good friend, V, in a long while.  By late fall it will be a year since he lost his daughter to brain illness.  He will be taking a long trip soon, with ashes and family.  He kept us posted, did not come for a long time, as he and his wife used to come quite often, squeezing into open spaces at the bar on wine tasting night and jazz night.

We've always talked about Eastern thought, Buddhism, wherever it might come, let it dovetail somewhere somehow into bar talk, be it through Beethoven's own availability to texts, imagined or not, or Schiller's, imagined or not, or in the slightly liberated talk of friends who wonder, now that they are settled with good fortune.

The night, the moon just tipped past full, the bar's waters placid, the boss not unhappy with business given such doldrums, the heatwave having passed, our good old friend, retired, tips in with some focus to talk to his friend.  "Perhaps Buddhism is your attempt at rationalization at where you are now...  {your job}  But, at least you have a steady income, even if it isn't much."  We've long talked about writing.  I like his candor now, with the same friendliness always offered between.  He made a few comparisons, with other  people's situations, and I was content with the time flowing through, that our friend Jim would get his dinner and a glass of wine likable to him, that the older couple my comrade will wait on magnificently like a college professor will arrive, order, get their dinner and wine.

It's a tricky thing, to toss high ideas around.    They can burst like balloons, fall in pieces, something to sweep up later.  It's a good sign people can talk about such things.  But the thought of rationalization, yes, one has to admit that possibility.  And that is, indeed, eye opening.  And, quite possibly, working in a restaurant requires a daily battle of rationalization.

It takes our other old friend at the bar.  He comes up the stairs slowly.  He sings, he arbitrates.  He says we should just put all this race stuff aside, quite well.  We smile and chuckle, and talk about his magnetism.  Like our other discusser, he has a hangar steak, and a glass of Pic St. Loup.  We two are alone, almost, when he leaves.  We'd just talked of knee replacement.  "Ted, you're an awfully nice guy.  Thank you," Jim says, turning to me, holding his hand out, as if he remembered some of our finer moments of sharing and entertainment and that time when people relax and recoup their winds.

I remember now, how talking once with V about Buddhist scripture, Lankavatara, or was it the Diamond Sutra, an off-hand comment of mine, attempting to interpret.  I was being funny, and you probably had to be there:  Indians talk a lot, are very verbal people.  Which happens to be true of V and his lovely kind beyond kind wife.  Which makes them interesting people to wait on sometimes, maintaining a fixed complex conversation when things get busy, when loagy servers move like blinded water buffalo also wanting to converse, when things get very disjointed, an arriving salad or soup is a miracle, an entree beyond immediate hopes while other stuff goes down.  So the great verbal verbosity of the Buddha comes sometimes in a nugget, believable or not, and it really is, I suppose, a rationalization of the life you know and created for yourself.  Who will ever know?

I do get tired sometimes--I'm sure we all do--of these pocket philosophical rants.  I get tired of my own voice throwing the ball back against the wall as it bounces to never really solve anything.

But it's not for one to think, but do.  Even if it feels like failure sometimes, backed by rationalization.