I'm in a bad mood at the start of work.   The walk through the woods was mild and sunny, and I did some yoga before, but when I get in I see them monkeying with the reservation pad, how are we going to fit all the parties in.  I bury myself in restocking, step by step.  When we're seated at the round table downstairs eating our baked chicken wings in rice, the young woman I'm going to work with pipes up, without much warmth, "I know how you are, Ted, don't offer any tastings until we get through things..." to which I respond, quietly, "Alina, I'm not an idiot."

Easter, and I have to be doing this kind of a thing, working Saturday night, and then back for Easter Sunday, the anniversary of my father's passing, then the rest of the week, and the scheduling server manager L tells me she had to put me on the schedule for the entirety of next weekend too.  Okay, whatever, but giving me off two of my usual shifts, which is fine.  I'll be tired enough getting through what lies before me.

The boss comes in, with jeans, shirt untucked, fashionable leather sneakers, greets my co-worker with pecks on both cheeks, and I'm already toiling away, surrounded by a full bar, and some woman, a regular, asking me if the veal special has butter in it.

Later in the evening, the boss comes up the stairs, and bids me good day, and we say, hum, yes, busy busy, that's good.  But a minute or two later, he says, hey, something about my shoes...  and I've been wearing my Brooks running shoes because rodents chewed through the laces of the other ones, and because my feet hurt.  He's right, but it doesn't help my mood much, at least it's getting toward the end of the night.

Easter dawns, without much meaning, so it seems.  No triumphant mood, and more one of "Fuck This."  Mom calls from up north, feeling very lonely.

I have a busser to help out, as the back room, the wine room, is full with two parties roughly at the same time.  And there's the bar, which needs attention from the start, an older African American couple who live out by Catholic University, who drop in from time to time, enjoyable people, and they are in for an early dessert and still wearing their observant finery.  The first party in the back turns out to be two sisters who grew up just west of Paris, and in their sixties, they are fun to talk to, and one mentions Muscadet, being introduced to it when she was five.  Asking about it, I tell her Hemingway liked it with oysters, as her story comes out.

My busser is helpful, but I've barely cleared the six-top when dinner, just fired, arrives, so I have to scramble for that, and my help seems one step behind for much of the evening.  He's been here all day, so I can't blame him, and he's a tireless strongman...  I've sent him home and think I've slayed the dragon when I hear the women downstairs speaking to the last arrivals, having called in a reservation, "yes, check out upstairs, it's very nice."  They are headed up the stairs anyway, even as it is just my friend and I, no one else, and I will just suck it up on Easter night.

They three turn out be nice, the daughter went to Mt. Holyoke, and for me it's either hate them or join them, as far as hospitality goes, and so I join them, and my friend the historian is telling excellent sketches from a night out down on 14th being kind to a mutual friend, a younger guy.

I reflect on his stories, how the Barbary Pirates moved in on the two women they were talking to, one sitting on the girl's jacket on the barstool chair when she gets up to go to the restroom, and showing off pictures of themselves with Secretary Mattis....

It's all about entitlement, such successes, so it seems to me.  It's not about who you are, but about how confidently you feel you deserve desirable things.  "The two Arab guys," presumably with enough money in their pockets to feel a fresh self-confidence, who think nothing of inviting the chicks to the Four Seasons or the Ritz for more expensive treats, have captured the day.

And me, poor old dumb fuck Tranowsky frets his time away carefully considering what he deserves and ends up living a monk's life, and one of service.  Dumbly staring down at his shoes as he scuffs them through the dust in the classic The Thinker pose of shyness, almost a stereotype...  Is it that he is now too careful, feeling old enough and weak enough despite his strengths to 'not bite off more than he can chew, and life is pretty precarious anyway...'  Thus tending bar, as if he doesn't even feel entitled even to write or to place much confidence in it or that it will ever pay off.

Mom calls back at the start of the shift, Easter evening, the light out on the trees across the street, pinkish white apple blossoms, the big old leaning elm that towers over the Boys and Girls Club parking lot with its new rubber green playing field in the distance and the stand of grand old Larches by the scholar's residences, and she has mellowed, considerably, having had a nice conversation with family members, and that's one more anxiety lifted, as I set up, careful to dress a little better and to try on a different pair of shoes taken from under the dresser, a pair of green suede Pumas.


One more shift, jazz night.  I drink the ginger water I brewed yesterday, make a pot of dragonwell green tea, sprinkle some flax seed, some astragalus, some schisandra powder, into my cup and refill it, diluting the taste away.  I've done a great job at work, my job, feeding the sense of entitlement that people have, generally more important people than I.  My body has its aches today, and a tired feeling   within, but the tea is helping.

And I wonder, what would I be like, what would life look like, were I to suddenly grow my own sense of deserving, being entitled to the joys and the abundance of the world rather than the stoic go-it-alone sense of things.  Still, though, I will try to keep enough energy after my shift to do some grocery shopping, a bit tired of the menu at the old Dying Gaul as far as the excitement of tastebuds go...


But what is the writer's entitlement...  A sense of having inherited an ability to discern some form of understanding of reality...  Perhaps his choice was not so much a lack of self-confidence, as it was perceived in the feminine world of many many options and suitors and opportunities for pretty girls.    A quiet sort of old man sense of deserving the act and the ability to write down the oldest and deepest truths...  to be a sort of Lincoln musing over, say, different sides of an issue both claiming divine will, and 'woe unto the world because of offences...'

Apparently it is a lonely station to occupy.  The opposite to the entitlement so plainly evident in the world and Washington, D.C.