You have to have faith if you're going to write.  You have to, actually, have the faith of a Peter, to keep on with it.   You'd never find the words.  Never have faith in writing down the next sentence of a thought.    Never have faith in the purity of it, beyond all motives but the good, worthy.

You have to stay calm, not get distracted, or nervous.   You have to seek the simplicity of it.  The prayer in it.  The efficacy of prayer.



I've got last night's dishes clean and drying, laundry hanging neatly above the tub, work shirts on hangers.  Tea.  Dandelion tea for detox.  Oatmeal, with banana.

Inspiration.

Just as desire makes human life, a writer needs a great inspiration to rely on, down in the deep, something he can sense is there, a truth, a verity, that makes his work meaningful, possible, worthy.

This might sound silly, or self-evident.  It might sound contrary to the workmanlike habit of any writer, who needs more just to show up every day and sit down and write than for some airy faeries of inspiration to come visiting like an angel.

Kerouac, On the Road, the original Scroll version, represents an inspiration, speaks of an overarching one, seen clearly, and even, one could say, a Catholic one, a Christian one, perhaps not by coincidence.  For a writer must seek to transform his life, at least his understanding of his life and his own place, in order to see any purpose in tackling the possibilities of another few sentences strung together.

A Lazarus, coming out of a tomb...

Kerouac is inspired, famously, at face value, by "the mad ones," the incandescent firework kind of people, but deeper in the inspiration is quietly not unrelated to a sense of the Holy.



But yes, what work is there to do today...  The body is recovering from the work week.  The mind is blank, not directly feeling any inspiration, nothing immediately occurring to the fingers that write...

After reading James Martin, S.J.'s commentary on the story of Lazarus, fear of the old, the worry over the stench of the body, before the new life is called forth, the leaving behind of the wrappings of the old personality symbols... the pleasures, the thoughts, all things that make a person feel visible and real, when such things are of the old life, before the calling forth...  All that stupid old stuff, encumbered, false...

"Go live some life," my therapist tells me.

I tell her, through the screen of my iPhone, perched upward above the laptop, supported by a bottle of soda water, about my visit up north, to see my mom, in early February.   The weather...  of all my regrets, how they came in to haunt me heavily during the visit.  The failure at becoming a musician, a dance man, a theater type...  Talent is a difficult thing.  In the crush to be a successful English major, to address every poem or short story with understanding, the talents, the guitar, were hidden rather than developed.

Later, I wonder, at all the literary posturing and striving of back then, a search for a career, and perhaps, that was my gut sense, to focus on the one terrible talent with its odd place in life, somehow awkward, unwelcome, but necessary to the life of the mind, for the very purpose of leaving a record of thought.   You pay a price for a literary life.

"Go live some life," get out there, play early Beatles songs, play your version of U2, Forty...  Hank Williams...  Try some improv, or some amateur theater, she suggests...


After the session, I am tired.  Still sore from Tuesday night, could have used another hour of rest...  But I get to the bus, climbing up, beeping my metro card with a nod to the driver, then back and up to first seat on the back platform, slumping into my seat...

I get to work, and the bar doesn't look bad, and that helps, stocked well, organized.  With back-ups.  They'll benefit from my work Valentine's Day dinner service.  Through having to move, stand up and wait for my stop on the bus, from the walk up the hill by the old mansion on 34th rising above the grand trees and the sloping yard, high two storied white porch and mansion brick, the body warms up, and I'll be ready to move like Harold Lloyd, or Buster Keaton, or Charlie Chaplin when the moment to move arises.  I come in through the basement, past the chef at his desk, past the pantry of the pastry chef, listening to his country music, the walk-in cooler and the linens shelf behind me now, up past the ice machine, mineral water boxes stacked after a drop off along with the soda six packs, the women of the kitchen getting ready for the salad stations...

Tilapia and rice, for the staff meal.  I get my plate ready, call mom from downstairs, and she picks up, so I take my plate upstairs and sit at the bar for a quick chat



The pace is fast, and efficient, none of the gaps that come from being over-seated opening up, but for a little crack here and there, manageable, a need for some wine explanations out on the first table of the wine room, table 60, an African gentleman, two ladies...  they go with Sancerre...  speak in amiable French at my little act...

And later on, after the dust is risen, and now in the proverbial air, my friend, a patron of the jazz, arrives for dinner, and she is here with an eye toward a belated celebration of my birthday.  She has a little present for me in a little classy gold-toned gift bag, with some appropriate wrapping paper within, what could it be.  You should open it now, she says.

And when I do, it's one of those German wine openers, immaculate brushed metal, with the two-prongs, and the simple pull handle once you get it seated.  I've never been able to get these ones to work for me, actually.   They are excellent, necessary for pulling out old corks that might crumble, as when opening a rare old Bordeaux...  And then she has brought out and placed on the bar before me a special shaped bottle of red, a Haut Brion, a 1999, at that.

Oh, man, you should'n't have, I mumble to myself...  I've got the bill ready for the kibbutz couple, regulars on Wednesday, but it can wait.  And so, I come around, to my friend, Leslie, you'll have to show me, walk me, through this.  But I do it myself, putting the longer prong in between cork and bottle neck, then the shorter end, and kind of back and forth until the prongs are in all the way, and now you swivel the cork around, and viola, it's moving, and then out it comes, hooray.  I've got the candle and the decanter ready to go, and by the end, there are indeed cloudy dregs, not much, but enough to stop pouring, and then I get the bill ready and swipe the card for my friends...  bid them well.  Ask what they're doing for the Valentine holiday...

Where's your glass, I pour her out a small amount, and then for myself, just a little.  Get her set-up for dinner...  Mineral water....

The boss comes by, Leslie offers him a sip, and they have a nice conversation about the old Bordeaux on our list....  "Do you have any Petrus," he asks her, as I run back and forth in and out of the bar.  The year of my birth, 1965, was not a good vintage, and neither was hers, but followed by good vintages, she tells me, a factoid humor.


Later on, I pull out my dish of veal cheeks, and sit down next to her, as the last two, a dear friend of mine and her second cousin, visiting from London--all Iranians are good at math, they tell us, and Leslie too is a mathematician of note--have all left.

Ted, it's in one of the Mitvot, after the story of Abraham, the mitzvah of hospitality...  Abraham is talking with God, and travelers come by, and Abraham interrupts, even, to be hospitable...

A good friend of hers, a nice guy, a jazz guitar local, a lawyer by profession, a kindly one, passed away suddenly at 66 last August, from cancer...  She tells me.  When one door closes, another opens, she tells me.  And I'm stupid enough, an oaf, turned around a few times in the maze of the jazz night service and the band's strange presence as sort of third-customers, to not quite get the implication, asking her.   The mind can do strange things.  I say, "yes, someone I haven't seen in months will pop into my mind, and then in a few days or so, boom, I see them coming up the stairs..."  She calls it "conjuring," and knows what I am talking about, through her own experience, and in the quiet at the end of the night, with cool jazz playing on the sound system, a note of good sense falls upon the existence of life as we know it.


Later on, it dawns on me....  This is what gets me about the proverbial Erica, the Princess of Cornbird from old college days so long ago, my failings at my true calling, how my hospitality toward another human being was lacking significantly, not that there were not mixed signals.

Imagine, at my first attempts at hospitality, I failed...

Then Sunday night, a couple, retired school teachers, on their way to the Dumbarton Oaks concert series pay me a visit to have dinner with wine.  They bought a copy of my book, and have brought a copy to sign.  Barry has come in just as the door opens as well, sitting at the bar, then joined by Michael and Dennis.  Familiar people, the wit comes out.  "Your hair is so long!”  I explain to them, well, I've been on the road a lot.  Michael's 50th is coming up early in March, they want to book the wine room, so I go to the reservation tablet...

Then Mimi arrives, to be followed by Carmen, friends of the big boss...  Oh, shit, here we go.  I'm sat also by a table in the corner, diplomats, a couple.  He sounds Belgian.  Goes for the mussel soup.

Then John and Vera.  Getting in before Happy Hour ends.  John, get a stool and pull it up to the bar, and Barry squeezes over as he takes his onion soup.  He's just had an operation to replace a bit of his humerus, another bone cancer tumor, with titanium.   The bar is full.  Another two, a couple, tall, slender throughout, elegant, Ethiopian.  And two young women, one a familiar face, pull up at the bar.  A few weeks ago, John’s elderly mother was due for eye surgery.  A lot came out between us, the difficulties...

Mimi orders an onion soup.  Carmen, I’ll have one too.  The soups come.  Carmen:  I didn’t order this.  She has half of it.  Too salty.  Africans like too much salt, she says, referring to the chef, jean baptiste, from Gabon.  Later, after pot au feu, she’ll go down and chastise chef.

(Jean Baptiste tells me the story later, when I enter through the basement a day or two later.  “Bruno is coming soon, eh?” she says to chef.  I do my best, he tells her.  He did not add any salt at all to the pot au feu, by the way)

So that's how it goes.  Full Moon night.  Mimi and Carmen like to hang out late.  Others have gone.  Like the boss would, Carmen rolls a cigarette.  I pull my piece of liver out of the oven, after the singing of Happy Birthday and the candle, sit down at the bar, pour out a little wine, and have some dinner.

Back behind the bar, the boss's lady friends praise me, how I entertain, at such a level.

The woman with the Irish background stays a little while longer.  We need to process the night anyway.  She tells me about a story about Martin's Tavern...

I try to walk her home, but by the time I catch up with her, as I walk on the street, she has her headphones in, and I don't want to cramp her space, she is at her front door, putting in the entrance code as I stand out in the street.  Okay, she got home okay.  I go the CVS, to put some more money on my Metro card pass.

And I wake up, a couple of times, then falling back into dream and waking again to the workmen making their noise, but still a strange mix of soreness, waking, tired...  I get up, find some tea, call mom, slump back on the couch.   I sleep more, dreaming again, and before two, at the normal hour for the night shift, I come back to life.

Earlier, before work, walking up from the closest bus stop to work, Mom is irritated.  You made me look for two hours...  But Mom, I just wanted you to keep your cell phone charged.  We got that done, I thought.   I explain where I'm going.   You should get a job that allows you to be a human being, she tells me.

Monday Night Jazz...

I am sore waking up from it...  Finally, waking at one, I give the body another half an hour before dragging up out of bed.

By two in the afternoon I am having my first cups of tea.  I guess I slept okay.  At least I wasn't bothered by too much noise or phone calls.  The muscles are stiff, the soles of the feet tight...


It shouldn't be like this, he says to himself.  Three very busy nights, lots of movement, circling around the dining room like a hunter.  He puts the dishes to soak, after climbing down the stairs to see if the shipment of green tea has arrived, nope, so he makes due with two bags of Twinings and a teaspoon of Matcha.

The bar crowd stays around, so the conversation goes on, and on.  Requiring thought and wit and improvisation.   Answering some questions offered by curious customers.  The boss sits with his wife and a friend of his wife's, squeezed in at the bar.  They sit just as the bar glassware washer machine emits the groan, announcing something has prevented the closing of the seal that holds the water, so you have to take out the rack, then reach in, on your knees, look at the mesh enclosure surrounding the plugging mechanism...

Why did you turn the light off, the one overhead the cutting board on top of the stove in the back corner of the bar, the ladies ask...  Well, it's just that sometimes I like it on, and sometimes I like it off, I shrug, demurely.  Just the mood.  No way of predicting it.  Then in a moment I explain sometimes the boss asks me to turn it off, for ambiance.  "I'm thinking of those customers out there, who don't want the glare as they dine..."  Lots of explanations for things.  Who knows.  But the ladies, one a songwriter, on top of being a lawyer and a Ph.D. in comparative lit, and the more erect one with a Burberry's scarf on, get the humor.


At the end of the night, Drew comes by, with a great story of real estate and zoning...  I finally get my dish of chicken curry, kept hot in the oven, and sit down.   Then I cannot resist the bread.   Goddamn bread, making my belly grow, a depth charge of weight gains.   Barbara joins the bar after the last kibitzing, encouraging me to get the guitar out before she goes.  At the end, from the safety of her home, she texts me that "You're Good."  Which sits in my mind as I waver in and out of sleep.  What a job...  You pay the rent, but who has the energy to go try and new job when they work you like that...


And on top of that, as if you weren't feeling guilty enough about opportunity and talents and how you should've kept taking French...  got a job where you wore a blazer at work... there's your old mom, up far away in the grey winter of Oswego...  A feeling of some helplessness...

Before the shower, a successful call to mom...  as stew heats up in the toaster oven...



How did it work, back in Jesus's day, this talent stuff...  Were there musician recording artists, and movie actors, and polished diplomats...

Were talents put into use being a study in human nature, its inherent goodness...

With people, back then, in an unselfish mode, moral codes were instituted, so that the sweetness of people would not be taken advantage of, that the anarchy of selfishness would not seize the day, with money, comfort, power, sex and intrigue, the pleasures of gambling and so forth.

And so with Jesus, so finely tuned to the wonderful talents of humanity, a sensitive eye is turned to bring fresh life and vigor to old commandment....

The layer of ice that came in the night before the snow blowing in from the North and the dark lake was as thick almost as the modern car window itself.  It covered the black Jetta he had rented.

It had taken time and effort, the car on defrost, to lift the ice off the windshield and then the side windows.  A corner might crack, then lift, and he could get it off in marzipan candy chips.  He figured out how to turn on the rear window defroster.  Meanwhile the snow was blowing.  He shyly stopped to gesture to the townhouse keeper handyman fix-it man Ben who was coming toward him with a snowblower along the walkways.  This sucks, I don't know why I stay here, for what...  four months of summer...


He got up early in the morning.  It was 14 out;  nothing more had accumulated.  He'd been awake for several hours, since his mom had called on her cell from downstairs...  He had turkey on sourdough with Poupon Mustard and Hellmann's mayonnaise, leaving half for his mom, had some tea with her as he ate on the couch with her after making her toast, and then he packed the car, said good bye, and it was too slick on the cement stoop for her to stand outside and wave good-bye, and he drove off.

The layer of ice still on the roof started to come off as he passed through the highway above Scranton.  Peeled away from the sunroof, flying off to shatter.  One piece hit the windshield of a pickup truck in the rear view mirror, but not causing any harm beyond the impact.


He had time to unpack the car, brush his teeth, fold a shirt for Saturday night at work, deciding to take the car back to the rental car garage in the hotel, and the Uber cab to work, driver by an older man, thin, hesitant at intersections, dropped him off at work at quarter to five, leaving him just enough time to set up.  But as he drove the car back, along Observatory Circle, and as he rode in the Uber down along the strip of Wisconsin Avenue, he felt the futility of all the years, his best, physically, wasted in the restaurants.   Nothing to show for it.  Still living a bit more than month to month.  Surviving.  The night, most likely, would not be much of an easy thing.  He anticipated a light amount of hostility from his co-workers.

In the end the shift wasn't bad.  A local celebrity, from a similar college as he, who had done well early in the on-line market of connected personal computers dropped in, and other friends, people he'd known over the years came in, along with all the chores.


In the distractions of visiting and caring for an aging parent for the week, his mind was different.  The idea, the concept, the purpose and the accuracy thereof, the appropriateness of his vision of the Lord Jesus, such as Jesus is, as someone not unlike himself, a capable worker at a basic trade, low in technology by modern standards, who would make the effort to be prepared, and recognized as a man with a job, this had receded.  It had receded as he went to work, his hands shaking ever so slightly, the nerves of the road, the nerves of a struggle immediately ahead, and of that struggle stretching on and only getting worse, these were thoughts that came to outweigh the other things as he returned to his life, his apartment, his job, having left his mother up north where the skies were gray, the clouds, the cold, the friendly people who always held the door for a neighbor...

Now it was make a quick stew with the meat before its too old, shower, shave, dress, what time is the bus coming had all come back to him, weighing at him.  On the bright side, before final prep, the chicken stew made the week before was still viable, and it even tasted good enough for him.  You never wanted to go to work without having eaten beforehand.  Even if there was a staff family meal.

He could feel the rattledness of old age, as he put socks on, ten minutes to go...

And then, visiting his mother...

It seemed to him the last most deepest talent, sadly, or sad, perhaps at the root of all, all the others somehow having been squandered to time.  Music, acting, whatever presentations of his self’s physical being as a speaking presence.  Girls, women, money.  “All pissed away...”
But maybe there was one gift still left, to somehow, like a physic or a mathematician, to apply.



The sports bar was noisy and crowded.  He didn’t want to go, but keep her entertained, too tired to grocery shop at 6.  Basketball, a war, shouting generals, muscular tattooed minorities...  like Vietnam.  The locals gathered, the local university, wearing of the orange.  A large kid next to us, yelling to make his voice heard over the weight of his rasp.



In such a situation one thinks most largely of all the lost opportunities, typically seen as the time of life when his own talents matched all the possibilities on offer, girlfriends, studies, careers...  he’d been too shy, introverted, keeping his talents hidden.  And thus falling into creepy situations he was better than.

And so he needed something positive to find within himself.  One last overriding completely unlikely talent at the base of them all.  After all, wasn't he good at self-inspection?

The pained gift of kindness, even to disastrous people...


Doing the dishes, looking out the kitchen window.  A Piliated woodpecker.  He called his mom.  Where’s my cane.  Oh, www, my ankle...  she got up from the old Eames chair, came to the kitchen.  He found the bird in the binoculars, and she saw the flash of red as he passed the glasses to her.

His way of thinking was completely different.  Ecological, beyond ecological...
As his father had taught him.


But, ahh, what can you do...  time has gone by, no longer slim...
Indeed, he’d done a great job hiding, putting away all his talents, times, chances.  The guitar.  Other less explored musical and rhythmic abilities.  And they weigh upon him as he rises.

Wisdom.  All a part of the terrible process of wisdom.

End of a five shift run.  Beginning with a crazed Saturday night, ending on a crazed Wednesday jazz night, full house, full bar, and Tuesday had not been easy either, as far as the pace and the physical effort.  I'd been thinking about going up to see mom with the few days off I had, but I was tired, and knew it was basically a good decision to not be trying to make that effort when I woke up.

But I woke up ashamed of myself, for such reasons, and after getting a quick call from mom, "rest some more and call me back later," she said, as I pulled myself out of bed and found a tee shirt, my green chamois shirt, my Adidas track pants, still with yesterday's socks on, after getting up and having cups of yesterday's tea, I looked through Facebook and related things on my iPhone, blankly waking up with wasting time.  I feel guilty about the distance, about not being able to go up and see her in such circumstances, but I'm tired.  Looking for direction.

Hot tea, fresh, is better than the third steeped pot of yesterday's tea, and I warmed some bone broth in a bowl in the toaster over, cut a lemon for hot water when the water came to boil.

It's too much, if work does that to you.  I'm even having trouble keeping my thoughts together, as if the string holding them together through the week has fallen.  On top of "sad, rather be elsewhere, but here I am, usual duties to do, and still taking my medication for the sinusitis."

Inspiration to what one was writing on the day before is distant.


And so when I woke, I made small prayers.  I called work to find that I could get some time off.


The road is the monastery, the great teaching.