Barman's Dreams After A Long Week

I’ve been at the restaurant Bistrot Lepic every night except one since the Saturday before St. Valentine’s Day, and even that week I only had one night off. Being barman at the upstairs wine bar, I’m the last to leave every single night. We get the late customers, the lingerers up there anyway. I finished up the paperwork, ate my cassoulet with a bit of wine, and got to feeling so tired I put some chairs together in the back wine room to lie down for a moment. One of those odd pulls of muscles somewhere in the upper back between shoulder blades, neck, collar, a knee brace for a knee tender since I ran a bit too vigorously the night of the first big blizzard here, down to the river and back by the Kennedy Center, regaining my stride of long ago, but limping back up through Rock Creek Park. Next thing I know it’s 5:30 AM, so I rise up from my bed of chairs, tidy up the last few things, ice the wines down, take the dirty plates down to the dishwasher in the kitchen, the lights still on down there, find my coat, and get going without changing from my work pants, thank god for a cab coming down Wisconsin with his light lit.

I come in, drink some water, and go straight to bed. I wake up at 2:30, microwave yesterdays’ green tea, feed the cat (who has purred alongside my slumbers in her own pleased wild way), Mom calls, good chat, neck, back and shoulders still killing me and though I make a fresh pot, it’s the couch's turn to bear my weight, blanket pulled over me.

I don’t quite remember the dreams of earlier. Something about a woman keeping me company, but I’ve forgotten what she looked like, a brunette somehow, and she was kind. We walked together in our coats somewhere, as down a street where there is a theater. I fall asleep again, lapse back into consciousness, then go down again deeper.

I dream of little towns somewhere, amalgams of towns I know from Central New York, little towns of sunlight and streams by a winding road, wooded ridges, green meadow fields. I remember, even in my dream, of roads I’ve dreamed of where the bicycling is beautiful, climbing through forests, a river below, and even in dreams I look out for where those roads might be, having a vague idea, enough to search for them and remember as I dream other dreams of them. Searching out a geography of places to explore by elimination. No, it’s not in Frankfurt, not found coming out of a mill town along the Mohawk as I thought before but tried in previous dreams, not some mysterious phantom leg of some quiet thruway through a mystical Vermont, nor down Route 5 West, or 12B South, nor off by Unadilla Forks, nor Vernon, or Knoxboro or Deansboro. The actual land has its limits, and this I know in my dream even as I create new roads and summon my family about me as if into our old ’66 blue Volvo station wagon, our old Yellow Submarine Chevy Malibu wagon, or maybe in some vaguely new and innocuous car, mom, dad, my brother and me, fading in and out as I look out the window as a valley off the main road begins to glow in particular, green, in both Spring and Summer. Somehow a large moose, incredibly large and tall and long, appears right by a bend in the road as it drops, and the moose with his big horns is curious and follows us in friendly spirit his huge quiet snout alongside of us, keeping up with a trot of the hoofs behind us, catching up now and again. And then a bear. Right in front you. Standing. Lumbering slowly off to rub against something.

We arrive somewhere we can pull up to. A house under trees, a forest beyond it. It’s like someone in our traveling party, maybe Anthony Bourdain himself, has made an appointment and we’re coming along as guests. Maybe dining and local produce will be involved. The people, the locals, are garbed in peasant clothing, the young women in white cloth bonnets like the Amish, colorful knit sashes of some Middle European country. I wonder about their clothing, relieved to find there is not some completely strict edict about being a man in woman’s company. This is indeed farmland, of grains harvested, yogurt and cheese and butter churned, of tables set with wooden bowls and table ware and salads, and proudly ripe produce and good water to drink. An old language spoken. Apples. Homemade wine.

I am relieved to find out when dinner plans are announced, that while I might indulge in a local beer, I am spared sitting at the adult table along with Mr. Bourdain and his production crew, and find myself not that hungry anyway, and left in the company of two young bonneted girls, one younger, an infant, and one barely a teenager. Their mom, friendly, subtle and wise to the ways of life, encourages our shy introductions and in their quiet company I go back to dreaming and planning my roads to bike on as I sit beside them, as if I were helping them shuck corn or hold yarn for their knitting, or watching them draw pictures and me drawing my own pictures while talking a little bit. The older one is pretty in a humble way and it turns out we can talk about this and that with happy touches of laughter and learning back and forth. I get a soft feeling in me, the kind that makes you bite the corner of your lips, and savor the time next to her, as the younger one goes off to amuse herself close by. It’s like we’ve known each other forever, and we talk and kid all the long while, the adults dining and drinking wine upstairs, and my Dad coming for us all later to join us at some comfortable time. The girl is kind and understands my desire for roads, and in talking somehow we iron out the great inappropriateness of our age gap and silently agree to be boyfriend and girlfriend for ever for the rest of our lives, which I am happy about as I have never been. We sit together with our sides innocently touching and this is the greatest way to discover, quietly, what life's about.

House cats linger over varnished floors and I look out at the back, and crouching interested and hidden is not a cat but a tiger cub, eyes bright, unmistakable face, soft yellow striped fur and white chest. The girls and I open the door and let the chubby little cub in, who darts in excitedly in attack mode, soon batting and rolling around with the equally matched cats. The adults come and watch the little tiger flopping about with the tabby cats in charges and turns and flips, and everyone gets along. No guilt. Just kindness. The good spirit of peasant mothers who recognize spirits in you and trust you and even encourage you to have your little wife who is too young to do anything but talk to and smile at and sit close to and look into eyes with, and isn’t she pretty in her white Czech top and dark skirt with flowered trim and little sandles. Nothing like a pretty face. And no judgment going on, just acceptance of what is holy and appropriate.

I’ll have to think further of where the dream took me. I woke up about 5. It’s Thursday evening. I feed the cat again, and run the dishwasher, packed full, through. I don’t feel up for going out, though I wish I did. Maybe writing, like brushing my teeth, will help.

There was a sorry note at the end of the dream, a bear’s paw, and one gets sad for animals. I wake before being able to get angry, but still a lasting and reasonable judgmental quality coming forward. There's the intention behind everything, the crucial thing. If you mean something with a good heart, then naturally it's okay. Is that always how the world works? No.

I remember now in the past year I was put in charge of entertaining a well-known French author and journalist. My friend had thrown a big Bordeaux dinner at the French Ambassador’s residence and needed to spend the day after getting things done. So with my high school French and his short English we walked out into cool late morning light down to the National Gallery, a pied, an agreed preference. It happened we were near Ford’s Theater, closed for renovation, but why not, stop in at the ‘House Where Lincoln Died,’ and see the little bed in a small non-descript back boarding house room. It takes two minutes. They stretched him out diagonally. There's a pillow, behind the plexiglass, with bloodstain long faded to sepia brown. (Or did I make that part up?)

On we went after that to the West Wing to tour the galleries. A fondness for the Venetians my friend brought across. He points out where paintings have been 'restored,' which is never good. We looked at a portrait of Napoleon in uniform, which I forget was either accurate or not so, as Michelet points out somewhere. Not the best anyway, but my friend studies it from behind his glasses, as if to say, 'well, not bad.' We talked a little of American History, and agreed to head up to the Portrait Gallery after lunch by Pei’s waterfall underground between East and West Wing. He had barbecued ribs, I had a piece of chicken, and we split a little bottle of California Cab.

Lincoln’s life masks, two of them, were on display, in a small dimly-lit room. There, on the wall, the portrait by Gardiner, a crack going through the lower corner of it, a picture of humor and humility and a lot of wear. One mask before assuming the office, and one close to the end, often mistaken for a death mask, which it is not. Cheeks have sunken, eyes wearily pocketed. The characteristic wart by the corner of the mouth, the strong set jaw, a powerful man aged into old, more skull than the viewer wants to admit, but still old Abe in living skin, eyes closed, tilted up at you upon something like a pillow angle. My friend, the journalist, who’d been held as a hostage in the Middle East for a number of years one doesn’t want to think about, I wondered what he thought as he peered brightly around the room, unfazed, curious, chipper, interested as he was later in who was blue and who was grey in another corner of the gallery. The faces of Lincoln… can you hear a voice? “No, I didn’t want to get old either. I too wanted to stay young and talk to pretty girls and not be old, but I did the best I could, took life as it came, and here I am today, and this is what I’ve got. This is where I am.” He used his image as PR, as a political tool to reassure people of his decency and justness. He would not have been vain about hiding his aging from handsome young fellow into prairie sage and beyond into old age. He wouldn’t have cared to hide that.