Just want to be normal...  Keep work separate from social life...

One true sentence.

It was raining hard.  Sunday afternoon, heading back to work for the first time since hearing the news of the sudden passing of my friend, the regular customer, Sunday evening being a weekly ritual.  The creek was high up to the green banks, a pipe was blasting water upward into the stream.  I walked with my college umbrella, golf-sized, purple and white, my heavier Brooks Gore-Tex running shoes.  Down into the woods, the path up ahead a channel of sitting water, then down across the bridge over the stream and up the long steep paved road.  My trudge to work, my warm-up for the lugging and the set-up.  The message on my phone, call me when you can, his ex wife, mother of his son, a familiar face.  I call her back.  He did not suffer, the paramedics said.  It happened suddenly, the hand brake on the car going as he took out the trash.  I explain when I last saw him, that Sunday night, before Labor Day.  She had gone up to where the son was a freshman, giving the news to him with the Dean and the Chaplain...

I walked onto work, changing out of my clothes, even my underwear.  Soaked through.  The kitchen folks are solicitous, sorry about your friend, and yeah, he'd been coming here a long time.

I'm a bit off.  A handsome couple comes, as predicted in the reservations to sit by the window.  Easy.  Order of escargot to share, then the kidneys in mustard sauce.  Tracking down hot bread from the busser.  Two glasses of Bordeaux.  Dinner followed by one creme brûlée and then another one.  Amicable.  The regular guy arrives as I begin with fumbles, mumbling the specials.  Chatting at the end of the bar.  Hold on a second.  It's taking my brain a bit to open the Bordeaux bottle and pour out two glasses.  Maybe it's the ragweed.

Then another arrival, newly habituated to the Gaul, then his date, they sit at a table.

(Beethoven piano concerto number five, the Emperor...  )

Another couple, a regular, coming up the stairs, as three ladies sit down, and which is the driest wine, so, tastes of Sancerre and Muscadet, sitting at the bar, as I fumble to make cocktails for the arrivals next to Mr. Chatty.  Old Fashioned, Manhattan... is the order.  What should I make it out of?  You pick, as if I might have an opinion, I go with rye, and again my brain struggles, to muddle, orange peel, breaking a glass on the first effort, and the mood feels kind of dreary to me.   A food order as I struggle to put together whiskey cocktails...  conversation...  Talk of Hemingway. .  what's your favorite...   Uhm... early short stories...  Big Two Hearted River, I guess...

Oh, we're out of salmon tartar, as the busboy comes over to help me cut bread.  The dishwasher is full of clean glassware, still warm from the cycle, and it would be nice to get some help with that rather than bread cutting...

Then an order for whiskey couple...  Okay okay...

Then the arrival of a Trans.  Who also is a talker, so you've got two conversation efforts going at two different ends of the bar...

When entertaining it is hard to do it without effort, without trying to do well.  I try to pull back, but that is not easy.

The departed, he always came on the late side, and often we'd been keeping the kitchen open just for his order, the last order, appetizer, entree...

My mother tells me, he must have needed to talk to you, she says when I call her.  You're doing a good job with all this...

And I'm there late, having an educational chat with the trans woman who is a lawyer, a year into her transition into womanhood.  It is the being penetrated that is the source of her pleasure.  She'll be having another operation soon.  She wants to be married to a man who treats her as a woman.

I'm there, late again.  But not too late, and an Uber driver, a guy from Lahore who understands the economic predicaments of service jobs and aging, gives me a ride home, pleasantly, and I go straight to bed without even looking at my phone.  No Thai lady boys, instead, Philip Larkin, gems like High Windows, and The Whitsun Weddings....


And in the morning, when I wake, I say to myself, you know, it would be nice to live a normal life.  Go to work, function as an economic unit doing his job, make money for the house, go home, and perhaps not even bother to write anymore.  Just have somewhere to go everyday, to not go crazy, to not encourage the late stayers..., to get home early, and rise and live another day, enjoying being alive as best as one can.