The week ends, catching a ride on the late D6 bus with a lady bus driver.  I sit up front and talk with her.  It's just us two, westward out of Georgetown.  She takes the curves with patience, swinging the long bus carefully through the turns, easier at this blank hour of night, all having gone to bed, few cars, little traffic to speak of.  Stopping by the hospital, ambulance and emergency blinkers in the lane ahead of us, she pulls us round and through, then sweeping the long bus onto the descent of Foxhall Road.

I've treated myself to a cheese steak, stopping at Manny and Olga's down the street from work, talking with a man with a red tee shirt Grub Hub, who will soon drop off the last order, go home, sleep, hopefully, for five hours, then rise and go to work with Metro on the new Purple Line, doing "environmental."  His son wanted to go to a particular school, so he moved recently, and he's working the two jobs now.  "Yeah, it's hard to go straight to bed, without unwinding."

Fog comes as the bus draws near to my stop, trees lit by street lamp casting shadows in the air.  The driver has been friendly, just the two of us chatting, me sitting up on the front right side close to the front door, the big machine grrrrr-ing rumbling underneath us as we sit in its steel upper cage.  The door swings open and I step down.  She is from Tennessee, near Bristol.  Good night, thanks for the nice ride.


It's been a long week, the day had an air of sadness around it somehow, and I open the clear plastic to go container and tear in with a fork soon after getting in and dropping my backpack.  There is not much substance to a steak and cheese, but enough, the tomatoes are good and fresh, warm soft onion, and after tearing through half of the super sized sub, it's hard not to want to appreciate the sweet soft warm sub roll part of the steak and cheese with its mayonnaise spread and the hot acidic peppers.  I must now lay back on the couch, and an open window brings in the fog, and I drift off to sleep soaked in sweat.   An hour later I wake, strip off my jeans, shower, try to sleep again, but now not only am I still soaked, but feeling bloated, at a loss to digest the heavy late sweet succor of the cheap late night pizza place fare.

Was not an easy night.  Mom calls, just before the door opens, the last shift of the week.  It's Labor Day Weekend, coming up, just not so much for me.  I'll have Monday off, but that's it.

How do we solve all this?  "What am I supposed to do?" she asks.  And she remembers how parents would come and visit, even as they had jobs too, they'd come, and then later on we would drive out their way...  "I've come all this way, and no one even drops by to take me out to lunch for ten minutes..."  She starts to cry.  "Whatever you want me to do...  I'll do it..."

And I feel the same way.  Maybe it's the ragweed, maybe it's true difficulty of five night shifts that shouldn't seem to add up as they do, or the distance...  But, one asks, what do you want me to do...  The mind shouldn't obsess over things, anyway.  Let bad thoughts go.  And maybe I simply called mom too often in one day, too much mood sharing on my part without the actual connection of physical presence...

Then, after I rise from the call, giving myself an extra minute laying back on the back banquet.  I have a coffee, and no one to pester me yet sitting at the bar with smiling anticipatory presence.

It gets busy soon enough.  A. driving hard.  The busser, M. appearing only sporadically.  One doesn't always feel like entertaining.  We're getting busy, the boss bringing up tables, seating different parties without telling us a word, who is who, in bullying mode, it seems.  He stopped earlier to give A a little polite bisous, but says nothing at all to me, as if I am invisible, much the same way as the night before.  Monday, he kept me late, to serve his family three courses.  After they cut us down to one.  Me.  On Jazz Night, to follow it up with Wine Tasting Night, after Sunday, diners showing up right at nine, at pitching closing time on a dead night.

The regulars, and the old regulars who've moved up to New York, they see it.  "How's your night going," the young man with a pretty woman of style as a date asks, loud as is his fashion.  "Oh, just fine," I mutter.  I contemplate a little pour for myself, but nah.

Bill and Ceci, down from New York, haven't seen them together in ages, East Village now, they used to be Sunday night regulars.  I refrain from telling them of the accidental death of one of their acquaintances from those days.  The anniversary about to come up, one year.  The Carolina couple, headed to the lake near Clemson, for a three stay, a good conversation amidst the intermittent, A. clearing dirty plates from the back tables, stacked in her hands, silverware;  I spend much of my evening down on my knees, stooping to brush the plates of leftover food with the silverware, stacking, washing my hands over and over.

Eventually, I warm to the three little parties before me, as I always do, as I fend off the little interruptions, all the things I must do to keep the dining room flowing.  I make my rounds to the tables up front and back, I do what I'm told, I clear tables, offer a quick quip or chat about, say, the veal shank special over flageolet beans...

The boss comes by later, into the bar area, asks if I've seen any rats, but my mind is too wobbled, to muster, more than no, no sightings, and he tells the story of the large one caught in the glue trap that he killed by stomping down on a milk crate upon the head of the rodent...  He puts the check for the jazz trio on the computer terminal cash register, most likely on his way out, and it's getting later now and I might need a nerve un-jangler sip of the red.



On the bed, but it doesn't work, I give up on sleep and rest for the time being, pour out a little wine, on the rocks, with a dash of bitters.  I need to go see mom soon.  It'll be two months almost, since the last visit.  I rise restlessly, the floorboards creaking underneath my soft weight.   The downstairs neighbor...






The last twinkling star to the east fades away as the jets lift off with lights on, banking then leveling off.

Daylight comes, too early.  I am tired.  I want to rest.


The end of the week, the end of having to deal
with a parade of people, energetic, closed
 to their narrative, too oblivious
 in their lives to get
 that constant companion of all of us,
 now, earlier and in our ripe old age,
the broken part in us.

Another week done of having dealt with the rolling crowd, and there's always those who don't seem to get it, and they, according to themselves, certainly, are not broken, but well on their way, not by fluke, to being successful, hard smart work, while the real of us, humanity itself, burn within with our despairs, our wish for the subtleties night rather than the brightness of day.  "Go and cut him out in little stars," as Shakespeare said, that the world would fall in love with night and avoid the garishness of the day...

Mom gets the broken, gets the tears.  Gets the lonesomeness.  And somehow it's always healing to go through the terror with her:  where will we end up?  I was feeling just the same, and without getting to talk about it, not intelligently, not even with my therapist on the other end of the line, without it knocking you down at gut level, you don't get it, you don't go through it, you don't process it, you don't come out the other end.

Poor Old Kerouac, Poor Old Lincoln, their mothers, their wives, their step moms, that helped them get there, realizing the universal pain spread across the face of humanity.  Another birth, another gestation, another feeding at the breast of the sudden forms of life that roll now and will keep rolling ever out of the Universe with its stardust and physical rules, all of it conscious too

(And this is why idiots like Kerouac and Yeats, the poets, the Leonard Cohens singing Suzannes Half Crazy who then themselves will dabble in the simplicities that will lead them to be either Greek Island or California Zen Monks, get it, because they are naif enough to be, to be, to be just what the Universe of That Which Is and ever will be and Which Will Ever Keep Changing and us equivalent to the moss that grows green and lovely on rocks by streams or on the bases of trees...  Such people will get the brokenness and speak little truths that then will be eventually picked up, as birdsong, birdsong truth, simple truth, real and eternal...)

And all hide from that, in their quick ever on the move success stories, always in motion, one way or another....  so it seems at this hour before I can finally go to bed, and then I sleep all day.