"Tadzio, dear," she would say, "you must be serious."  And I would look at her, not know what she meant, and know even less how to put what she was talking about into any terms even to begin with.  "You must be very serious," she would say, a little more slowly and leaning forward, and then she would lean back and laugh her old-fashioned Polish laugh like French women sing when they talk, suddenly unable to control herself, look through her glasses at me again with a serious expression, and then say, "Oh, Tadzio, Tadzio," and start sort of giggling again in refined hushed tones, sometimes having to wipe a tear from her eye almost.  Then sometimes she would narrow her eyes, and slowly say, from a distance just the word itself, as if hoping that would help such a lost cause, "serious."  Often while we sat facing each other at a card table we'd just removed some paper clutter from.  Enough room for a few plates and our wine glasses, coffee cups waiting to the side, the bottles kept up behind the television.  (She didn't mind her white Bourgogne at room temperature.)  She had lived in the same humble apartment, with her husband until he died, in 1988, since something close to 1965, the year of my birth.

Madam Korbonski, Pani Korbonska, as I would call her by, had married her husband, a prominent Warsaw lawyer, in '38 or '39, been an integral part of the Warsaw Underground, the Underground Polish Parliament, the Warsaw Uprising, and she was my neighbor until at 95, really 98, she passed away.  When the moon was full, or there was another excuse, I would be invited over for a late night 'coffee,' or really wine and cheese and sometimes things stronger than wine, along with lore, history, the personally smoked salmon of Kuklinski, who had survived, old photographs, the life she shared with her equally heroic husband and the secret radio broadcasts they had pulled off at great peril under Nazi nose and triangulation, lessons in music, such that sentimentally I hold on to her old Zenith hi-fidelity portable record player from the Sixties even though it doesn't work.

She believed, in things like ghosts, in chance meetings, in the Polish character, romantic as Chopin's, independent, in folk medicine, and talked to her sister, ailing, back in Warsaw over the phone.  She did, when I knew her, travel back to Poland--she and her husband had escaped the Soviets by boat to Stockholm with little more than photos and the shirts on their backs--for the opening of The Museum of the Warsaw Uprising.  Returning on the airplane the circulation of her lower leg veins was compromised, and she bravely fought back to health through some great pain after ignoring the initial need for medical care.  Our visits continued on.  She showed me serious medals she had been given, in a box, with a wide red and white ribbon of an important order with the Polish Eagle in grey metal.  Her funeral ceremonies, one at the small Parish church in Silver Spring, and the one in Doylestown, Pennsylvania where she was ultimately laid to rest next to her husband, were completely in Polish, the latter after a, to me and my mother, Fellini-like procession following, with ranking Polish military, her stainless steel flag-draped casket through a Polish festival with tee shirts, fried dough and peirogi and grilling kielbasa while the priest chanted through portable speakers another behind him held raised on his cassocked shoulders.

Tadzio, be serious, she would say, always with a bit of a giggle to the side, then a stern look over at me, going so far as to lower her glasses for effect, and then we'd listen to music, I'd hear more stories, she'd ask if I had any girlfriends, she would let out that her friends probably thought she was quite crazy for having Tadzio over, for such fine spreads of pate and terrines and plates of cheeses, stranger more Old World delicacies, chocolate, a fine staple food for people fighting back, fruit, and finally it would be almost light out and we would adjourn and I would almost sneak back to my flat next door parallel to hers, sleep late, rise a little bit hungover and go off to work.  And one Christmas Eve, I forget if it was before or after midnight, somehow we did it the right way with a toast of vodka and pieces of smoked or pickled herring-like fish served on little pieces of bread that to my ears sounded like "sledge."

And in all the time, no, she never really explained what she meant by being serious, though of course, she, her husband, all of Poland and the stern looking fellow in a photo, was it Rataj, with a mustache and a handsome widows peak, shot by the Nazis, all knew what it was, to be serious.  Somewhere along the way--I helped her for a time on Wednesdays with her grocery list (typed carefully), until, a boy still, I let her down--she'd read a printed out manuscript of the book set at college I'd written, and she proclaimed and exclaimed with real excitement and pleasure, in a fine note, and immediately also over the phone, that I was indeed 'A Writer,' confirming it for all time, and that I must keep at it.  For a brief interim period I would slink by her house thinking of the boyish at times puerile tale she, a great lady, would be abused to read over, the typical callow stupidities, the foolishness of directionless American college life, until the glowing note arrived, brought over by one of her helpers.  And something about reading a manuscript reminded her of the life she had lived with her husband, how she would transcribe the histories and stories he wrote on her vintage green Olympia typewriter for which I'd sometimes go find ribbons for, the books left to record the history of a nation tossed to the wolves.  One is lucky not to have seen people being blown up, lucky not to be beaten on the scalp with a belt during interrogation, lucky to have not had to walk through Siberia to freedom.

And unfortunately, "writer" too, is a term like "serious," incomprehensible to an outsider until it maybe falls upon him.  What does it mean?  When does it apply, and to whom?  What do we really know about Ernest Hemingway, about his methods and abilities, beyond that he was a magpie, a bit of a clutterer, who liked to hang on to things like old theater tickets and feria posters, odd bits and ends, memorable stuff, who kept cataloging sort of commentary notes he wrote himself in the margins of the books he kept in his library, as if all such things might pop into his mind and remind him of something that would one day be useful to writing something, as if they held a latent emotional import.  (Worthless to anyone else.)  Why did he hold on to things?  Why did he go to bars and talk to people?  Did such things offer some form of encouragement to him, as Madam Korbonski was subtly offering me encouragement with 'be serious,' surrounded as she was herself by mementos and pictures, one of a pet raccoon from summer in Cooperstown perched on someone's shoulder.  The entire process and the product itself, at the end of the day, how could you possibly define it, explain what was satisfactory, or what had been achieved in it, but that now, or one day, it would be like an old song, worth listening to again.  And perhaps the two fall into place beside each other for some of us, as the only way to be serious in life is to write, as the only way to write is to be serious?  How do you become a writer?  Well, as been said, you write, you write a lot, you write when you can and at other times absorb, largely out of things you enjoy doing anyway and that seem good for the health and spirit and mind.

Was there any hope for me, about becoming serious, in context of a woman whose husband had realized he was on a train to Siberia he needed to escape from?  The discussion, she never allowed it to go further, or elaborate, or leave helpful hints that I didn't completely miss beyond an envy for the serious. And what should I do, how should I get out of the restaurant business, in order to better be a writer (whatever that could be, in my humble context), and she looked at me quite calmly and would say, "Ah, but Tadzio, you must.  Everyone must have a job that pays them."  I would think to myself, glumly, 'okay,' but then the glum would lift, even if my job seemed hardly cut out for someone of noble intentions.  And I would bring her back halves of the good baguettes from the night, leaving them in a little bag hanging from her doorknob when I came home, and that was obviously a good thing.

And it probably took me a long long time, and a good few years after her death, and after my father's death--the two had met and really immediately been two peas in a pod and sang words to a Chopin air that he recalled and that she immediately picked up on--to think on seriousness.  ("Oh, I'm sorry to hear that," he said, with a thick voice and then a sob, as a kid wouldn't hide one, when I told him the news of her death.)  And maybe these things are, really, right under your nose, and that's primarily why you don't see them.  It is the seriousness which you let yourself, help yourself bring to any job, and in a way I've finally seen the seriousness behind the general job of hospitality, the job of bartender.  Maybe it's what you bring to it.  Maybe you can feel some days like you bring too much to it, too much that will never get used, perhaps things that will almost seem at times antithetical, like a Buddha talking to himself in a room full of wild-minded tongue-loosened pleasure seekers.

Pani Korbonska was an intimate friend of the beverages of life and hospitality, her style being the formal Polish table, to which she welcomed later in life a Polish president, and Lech Walesa.  To one of her luncheons, it was best to bring the appetite of a horse and be prepared for wine.  I will admit, some of her lady-in-waiting and sweet helper's schnitzel ended up, half chewed, in my sock.  Like the homeopathic medicine she told me to rub on my bare chest to keep the cold away, wine and brandies and vodkas had a medicinal reality, an obviously beneficial spiritual presence, and so, perhaps my deep intuitive understanding at the little brand of good I do with my two hands in a troubled world isn't so far off.

Over the years, people have shared quite a lot with me, deaths of pets and dear people, illnesses and medical reports and coping mechanisms, books, thoughts, career achievements, the changes in personal lives, and to the extent I can, I've been, I've tried to be, there for them, present and not just shaking a drink, but listening and feeling what they feel.

Many lessons over the years, about how to be patient, non-judgmental, lessons about the humanity in everyone, minor lessons about egotistical people who wave you down and ask you to check with the maitre d' when the table is going to be ready as they sip their martini.  Lessons, repeatedly taught, but not quite grasped, about how it's really best to avoid the shot of whisky, as good an idea as it might seem at such a time of camaraderie.  Let's admit, none of us are saints.  We fuck up.  We get up late and hungover, until I suppose at a point we learn better, through certain obligations of adulthood, not to.

Does one allow himself to be serious ever?  Or is indeed, if ever achieved, something like the seriousness of Lincoln, who would soften serious and grave matters with the seeming polar opposite of a little tale, or a kind of joke, the humor always a step away.  Do matters of life that require seriousness simply fall so that one must pick up seriousness?  Live, I guess, and learn.

Perhaps not many of us can claim seriousness as much as, say, "the poor handless Spaniard" Cervantes --he got an axe in the battle of Aleppo--and even he begins his great work with the small basically polite joke that the poor figure who will be both brunt of and inspiration for, fool and brave hero, has from reading too many old tomes of chivalry, like El Cid and that sort of thing, gone completely soft in the head, taken upon himself the fancy of having fallen from such pages as regular townfolk are wise enough and practical to burn.  That hero, Quixote, of course, is at home in a tavern (indeed meets the reason of his quest, the beautiful Dulcinea, in one, fancy that for odds) and in a barroom, as if such were a fine place for light to shine upon his noble visage, which of course he, like many of us, puts on.

And how else would anyone ever tell a tale of barrooms and bar tending without that Quixotic element, a basic sharing of life and stories, flawed and distorted and told from angles as they all must be.

The nighttime, obviously, at least in Pani Korbonska's book, was a time for explorations, for relaxations and stories.  And even, yes, a time for seriousness, sometimes the only seriousness we will ever know.

Perhaps that was the joke she was an insider to, to which I had not developed the proper sense of humor or cultural understanding.  This before me, live, with the moon full such that one wouldn't be sleeping anyway, even if she was 94, maybe particularly so, was seriousness itself.



And so it seemed to me, what I had long heard, what I had even long been telling myself in my own way, what everyone around me was telling me to do, that indeed I should write about bar tending, about how I kept my own sanity through it, with it, sometimes despite it, how I might have helped keep other people sane and balanced, to the extent one can as a more or less helpless outsider.  I should write how tending bar was deeply related to writing, and how, in the end, it was a deeply serious calling.  The only thing was, that I felt obliged to do it in a certain way.  "Here," John F. Kennedy once wisely said, in one of his many little poems, "the myths are legion, and the truth hard to find."  ("Those who wished to ride the tiger/ ended up inside.")  I could only write a personal book, about how I saw it, what I took its purpose to be.  I could only write it is a reflection, maybe in the way that Hemingway wrote that book, early on, about, of all things bullfighting, with periodic meetings with a wise old Spanish lady who seems to offer question and advice.  I would write about it in the way Kerouac wrote of his jobs, the difficult one of being a brakeman, perhaps as a traveller ostensibly helping out delivering a motor car across country.  And I would be thankful for it, even if it didn't always feel that way.  Could I even remember all the things I should relate, enough to make for a readable story?  Would I have aphorisms, or advice, or funny tales of dealing with certain types?  Or rather wouldn't I write a book about being a sort of sponge, and the things that attracted me as I drifted, the things that helped me when I was alone at night with no more Polish lady next door.

Lord knows, I get sentimental.  And there is a fine song that has that line in it, sung by Astaire.  Why do people, with their guard down, at ease, like to listen to music, like Sinatra or Ella Fitgerald when they unwind over dinner?  Hey, a glass of wine, what's not to like?  And somehow, I think, the whole thing does lead you to a certain wisdom, something about the ego, something about letting that go, something about allowing yourself to enjoy without preprogrammed judgment the moment before you, which is, really, as wise people say, all you have in life, anyway.