So the schedule had given me two of my usual nights off, the nights I am expected to be there, so that I would fill in over the busy Friday and Saturday night.  And this throws me off, and it's even a relief to be walking through the warm woods with the sun out and cherry blossoms and water in the stream, and mom has called a few times already, asking what the plan is...  Going back to work.

But it is not a joy when I arrive.  The kid didn't bother to restock.  And the whole downstairs main dining room has been 'bought out' for a wedding party, and so the busboys are luging the taller tables up from the basement, and putting away the teak cubical coffee tables that normally serve as tables up at the wine bar.  The same with the chairs.  And this is bad, because it's going to get very full, and people dining with the subtle expectations they have eating downstairs on tablecloths, and not this experiment in service ad hoc that it a night at the wine bar.

It's one of those nights, like the old days, when you just keep moving, keep moving quickly, taking the night bite by bite, doing what's immediately necessary before you, a dessert order, relaying a coffee tea order to the busser, keeping the dishwasher running through as all the glasses are either dirty or piling up, almost completely out of wine glasses, clearing tables, taking orders, twisting, turning, reaching...  with no idea of what's going on, just keeping doing it.

So I am exhausted when it is all over.  And the night had been too busy, dodging people, reaching, etc., always something to do, more butter dishes, more bread, what the hell is going on, I don't get the chance to pour myself much electrolyte water, but, when I finally had time, wanted a more numbing beverage, pinot noir on the rocks when I finally had some time to catch my breath, and mom calls again, sounding a little confused, who is picking her up, no one is telling her the plan, does she need to move to the other house...  I do my best to soothe her over my cell out on the front street when there's breathing room after the desserts and checks...

I get home, take my work shirt off, and sag down on the couch with the television on, and soon cannot move, not even to get up to go to bed more properly.  Around 5 AM I'm awake enough to brush teeth and go to bed, but I cannot now go right to sleep, so I check on a few things, like bank account, like my American Express statement.  Worries.  The inner worrying voice tells me, I've waited too long to make the changes I really need to make, to find a job that doesn't kill me, a career path, etc., and now mom is falling apart, so it seems.  I've tried, the voice says, and it hasn't, of course it hasn't, gone that well for me, and I know this, and am trying to rethink the whole reasons why.


Later, with Kerouac and New York on my mind, I dream of the princess.  We have a harmless meeting up in her big city, and she's friendly, solicitous even, and helpful, and generous taking me around, finding good stuff to eat.  It turns out she has an illness.  Her fingertips are disappearing, withering away, incomplete ends that aren't so much fingers anymore, strange, and I realize that's why she's wearing a sort of a scarf kind of a thing, to protect them.  She is getting treatment, but I admire the saintly way she's dealing with this strange disease...  She too is a saint, dealing bravely with the strange conditions of being alive, holy mother.

And also, another chapter of the dream, more or less, that I show my wine bar customers that I am, indeed, carrying a Cross, even beneath my humor and my charitable cheer, and when I wake and meditate, there is the Cross within too, blueprint of our nervous systems.  It's okay to be dramatic in dreams.

When I wake, I find that I do not have to work.  Thank god.  I am out of gas.  I turn over and rest more.

And in fact, so put out I am by the awful night holding down the fort, that I don't move off the couch, and my fears about the place are fueled, and there's no real good mood to be had, and then mom calls again, and then after that I want a glass of wine, from a chilled bottle of Beaujolais...  And I've been famished, going through various leftovers...and still, rehydrating, still, not feeling any energy...



You're not having fun anymore, my mother tells me, the next day, as she calls for the second time, around noon, so finally I get up.  I carry the cell phone into the kitchen, find a small mason jar of chilled green tea, patiently going through the whole, this is where I am, but I have to move it all and the cat over to the other place...  Mom, no, you just need to go down to get wine at...  We talk, I ask her if she's still watching the Masters, or if, in her wine shortage last night if she made a vodka v8 for herself, if it came to that, and I forget to tell her about the BBC piece I saw dramatizing poor Dylan Thomas coming to New York...  I manage to mention, in my groggy state, I rode my bike indoors, that it's just the start of the season, that Paris Roubaix was today...  Yes, the bike will be fun, once I get back in shape...

Yes, a shrink told her this once, you're not having fun anymore...  And your father wouldn't know fun if it fell on him, (though it turns out he did know how to have fun...)

Well, well, it's not so bad.  I'll slowly wake, drink my water with baking soda and good salt, and the salt of the earth shall have its savor and I'll go off to work, get set-up, no matter how the kids left it, and then the Sunday regular people will come, early and late, to talk of hip replacements on the horizons, and retirement, and other things, and the pace, hopefully, will not be that of a one-winged coat-hanger, and I'll get peaceably through the night shift, avoid the tree pollen exposure, earn my little share of the tip pool with my three shifts this week, they kind of screwed me on that...  And I will work then Monday, and then Tuesday, and then Wednesday I'll wake at the proper time and remember the proper time of my therapist appointment, and after that I will not have to go to work, and that is fine, they're putting me on Saturday instead of Wednesday Jazz Night and that is fine...

The nice couple, middle aged as I, a few years older, who got engaged at the Gaul one Paris Roubaix evening--Cancellara won it that year--might come by, and things will move forward into the week.

But a lot of thought goes into all this waiting and serving on people.  A lot goes into hospitality.

Listening to NPR, as I ponder going off to work, I learn it's poetry month, and they are talking about Walt Whitman.