The Meaning of Bartending

When I was young, I came into tending bar the honorable way, if there is such a thing. A knight has a squire, a barman has a busboy and bar back to help him and keep him company at the end of the night when all are gone and time for cleaning and restocking. I guess I learned through awe and observation and appreciation for a barman's work, by those I worked for. Johnny, Lawrence, Jennifer, Brenda, Jodi, Kathleen, Patience. Old Tom from next door.

But of course, I ask myself, the meaning of bartending. A young fool can think it's about the drinking.

Buddha, remember, was an ordinary man, like you and I, who achieved enlightenment. (Okay, maybe he wasn't perfectly ordinary, being an educated Prince and all that.) Maybe the questions he asked weren't so ordinary, either for the time he lived in, nor for the perspective he brought to light. Part of his point, though, was that if he could do it, so could you.

It is written in Buddhist texts that the people we encounter in this life by seeming happenstance are ones we have known in previous lives and incarnations. Think of it. My. Perhaps then it follows that this life presents an opportunity to remember old ties, to reestablish, to share the underlying fundamentals of the nature of reality, and maybe also to make amends for misunderstandings, for mistakes. A good friend of the bar where I work brought in an old Chinese saying, something like, 'you live long enough, you'll see your worst enemies float down the river.' (He says this in a jolly way, suited well to the literacy of the English, and in fact, he is a translator. He likes Bordeaux, if he has to drink French, though he would prefer Italian, a Barolo, as he lived over in Italy as a young man, back when such wines were local and inexpensive.) But we can do better than that, as they say.

It has its rich moments, it does, being a local barman. And last night, was one of them. My old buddy from college dropped in. He's working on development in an African country, so that they too can enjoy some reward for their toils, take care of children, have decent lives.

It does the creature good to have an old friend for company at the end of the night. You listen to happy and sad, of achievements and struggles, of learned lessons and new opportunities and the passing of some things that once were close.

And the next time, a stranger walks in, you bow before the wonder of what is possible, receiving down deep in instinctive ways of inklings of what a person can teach you. My 90 year old Polish neighbor would call this at its basis the love that Christians and Catholics as she attribute to the meaning of existence, and I know that she is right, because I have a deep trust of her, besides what I can figure out on my own, in my own confused way.

I sent an email to my mom elaborating on my friend's news and achievements. And she said to me that something I had said should go into a chapter in my wine book, The Meaning of Bartending. It's been percolating in notebooks somewhere.

No, you're never going to be rich, or be topdog, nor are you going to help people with the world issues that people so much need help in. But you will experience some moments where an equal plane is reached, when the realities of the nature of existence seem to hold there before you and a guest, when a light seems to shine from a heart and point the way toward some sense of satisfaction to be held at the end of the day, or night.