Have I ever really understood the concept of work...


Okay.  Yesterday.    Took the bus down to see Heather, my therapist, 12:10 bus, slowly makes its way, hot downtown.  Confident strivers on the sidewalks...  In through the doors to the lobby to the elevator bank, up to the fifth floor.  She has an announcement, as I sit down on the couch facing her chair.  She's moving back to New York State.

I tell her about my yoga and my nature walks.  I tell her I am feeling like a natural out in the new apartment out in the Palisades by the reservoir.  There were initial misgivings and hardships, but it seems to be slowly working out.  And it's good to be out of that situation of uncertainty.  The move was difficult, but now that I'm here and can just get out for a walk, things are better.  Work's okay.

Then up to Dupont Circle, stopping at my street vendor Vietnamese lady who serves the Syrian Halal lamb gyro across the street from the National Association of Broadcasters building.  Spicy?  Yeah, sure.  Thank you, my friend.  I put a buck in her plastic tip cup.

Up to see Patel my primary care doctor for a follow-up on the Brown Recluse Spider bite on upper leg.  No, it's not infected.  Hmm, they look at it.  Sending me on to a dermatologist.  Go get a box of Tegarderm clear plastic bandages at the Rite Aid, up there in my old neighborhood.  An attractive young woman in short shorts in perusing the make-up aisle.  I recognize her from Glen's Market, probably has a boyfriend.  "You don't need any of that.  You're perfect already," I saw, passing her quietly, and she says, "thank you," friendly enough.  "Do you still work at Glen's?  I moved out of the neighborhood, and I miss it."  "Oh, no.  Yes, I stopped for a while but I'm back now."  "Good."  I go downstairs to find my bandage supplies.  Yeah, the clock is ticking now, and I gotta get a bus to work, and man, it's hot out.

By the time I get off the D2 bus from Dupont, carrying my lamb gyro over salad, the sauce dripping out from the foil topped with the plastic lid into the plastic bag, I'm pretty tired.  Tuesday was wine tasting night, and it was busy from the get-go, ending up with a mutual friend of Julian the old sommelier and wine buyer for the Four Seasons who's relocated down to Florida.  This fellow owns wine shops in the Boston area with his family.  He's in with his wife.  They take a bottle of the Minervois from Z Wine Gallery we're tasting tonight. I persuade them to go for the veal cheeks finally.  It took several visits back to them and a fair amount of talk.  And at the end of their meal, no dessert to cope with, just put the wine in a paper bag, Rodolfo catches me up on how Julian is doing.  And about Italian wines.  Now you have to go up into the high piedmont to get a good old school red, not ridiculous in alcohol.

Now, as I eat my halal lamb at the bar in the darkness with the AC units tweaked as best they can, the office door open, the wine room unit temperature adjusted down to 69 degrees from 74, I am hungry.  I'd held off on eating, hoping I could get the blood work down for a physical, but the lady downstairs to take the blood had gone home already anyway.  I try mom's phones, without getting through.  I rise and start setting up.  Replenish the Pigoudet rose, get the spoons out where they need to be for the ten top coming, take the wines out of the main ice bin and into the tub and the sink plugged with the champagne cork, just so, back-ups ready to go should the crowd by into the Sancerre tonight, etc., yes, tired, but if we just get a good set-up mis-en-place done, well, that will be out of the way when the demands start coming in.

The bar fills up, Jim, the early guy, retired, just back from Berlin and Hamburg.  Okay, talk wine and things in general with him.  Then the local couple--he's from the UK, Manchester--who've I not seen since the big match, and they're expected a third, and she's into wine.  Two Ketel Ones with olive...  menu, set-ups...   Keeping up the patter is tiring, and now people are arriving, look up their reservations on the iPad, okay, seating them, etc.   Thank god I had Monday off.    Tuesday wine tasting will do it to you bad enough, and now, we've still got hours and many smiles and small politeness to go through, there's a woman by herself at the bar, a Takoma Park kind of person, Jim's still there, okay he's ready for his salmon now, the ten top is seated and ordering a few cocktails now though the server my friend who's just back from an electronic music festival in Detroit...

A last couple comes in, they met here.  And another woman who comes by herself late on Wednesday, and she's found a new guitar, from a pawnshop out in Charlottesville, and Julia, a publicist, who travels to Shanghai for work, she's all set up at the end of the bar too.  And we will talk now, catching up, how have you been, long time no see, what have you been up to..   I'm tired, irritations are rising, and I need a little Beaujolais on the rocks in a tumbler to see me through the higher altitude camps of this long climb now.

Conversations, kept, held together, brought together at the six or so seats at the bar, fifteen years and more...



A. and I sit down at the bar at the end, and I eat my spinach after the half of an apple tart she saved for me.  A little bubbly for her, a little more red for me.  When you're tired like this, the body likes its wine somehow.  The energy to get home.  We're overdo for a talk.  I'd put up something on Facebook about Uli's empty chair, his birthday missed.  I'd commented on my post about aching from head to toe, about how you get in a cab and go home alone at the end of all to an empty place, what's the point of all this...  But, this is still a very good place to work if you have to be in the restaurants...

I wake up late the next day.  Feeling it.  Embarrassed.  I try calling mom.  I'm on the phone setting up an appointment with the dermatologist when an incoming call rings and leaves a message.  And it turns out to be Life Alert, but I get through to mom, and she's fine, just wicked awful lonely and where are my sons.  She's had a glass of wine.  Paramedics are on the way, so I call them back.  They want her to call back in person.  I try a three way call, the dispatcher is satisfied now, she'll try to call off the paramedics if it's not too late, but they come anyway.   The cat set the button off, it seems.


I take a long slow walk on the path, now mowed, under the reservoirs, down to the river.  The fish are jumping, the herons are flying low over the river, skimming it.  There are two old red rowboats with fishermen standing in them, casting their lines in the water.

Sometimes it's just lonely down by the river.  It starts to rain.  I walk back, admitting to myself the power of the depressions that get into your system.  And I wonder at some of the causes, looking back, of the double bind a girl can put you in, so that you feel bad in every way you possibly could.  You bring her flowers and you're a jerk.  You back off and you're a jerk.  You're the male, it's up to you, you get twisted round in every way.

You've been a million different creatures, sentient beings, in this long continual life.  You've been sand.  You've been a tree.  You've been a dragonfly.  Everything in the book, everything under the sun, and here you are as a human being  and you can't get it right.  And never even let off the hook...

Chalk it up to being a weird person from the start, a lover of nature, an ancient type who fits less and less in with the modern world...