In the dream at the end of the week I find myself kidnapped.  A man who came by work I see driving by, he is swarthy, powerful or rich, and in the his car, as he is not the driver, there is a woman brought along just to accompany, and she is wearing black in a revealing way under her light black blouse there in the back seat, and with the promise of them taking me to work, as I must go to work, I get in too.  But in the drive along the quiet main street they do not stop, and keep on going, and then, even as I protest (I must still take them to be reasonable somehow) they are driving across the bridge over the river, and the river is brown and rising, swollen up to the lanes of the bridge, such that crossing itself is a great risk, one not sure if the bridge can even hold.

And they are taking me to some sort of business opportunity, perhaps another restaurant set-up there on the other side of the river, a popular place, sort of akin to, say, Bethesda, if one were to travel on foot or by bus or cab solely around NW DC...  A line of restaurants...  These will be hot spots... they tell me...

But even wasting the night over, no immediate way to get back until morning, I want no part.  But leaving, it is awfully hard to gather my things, stacks of books I must carry out to a family car that I am delaying...  And I have to drive my own car, but now there is a great snow storm, and I can barely see out of the window, blind to the sides, and everyone seems to be driving like a mad person, fast, despite being barely able to see, traffic circles of ice and uncertain plowing...  and I wonder how to get back to the main road...  There is a young woman, Wendy, I vaguely know and vaguely like much, and she is charge of plowing and road treatment and tells me the best road...



At the end of the last, the second jazz night of quite an 'oh boy' week that started with the crazy Saturday night of Restaurant Week, which proceeded through an ornately complicated Bordeaux wine dinner back in the room, then a slow Monday night with an artful but very loud trio of a kind of progressive jazz hard to define conventionally, vocals, electric violin, percussionist playing at hight levels...  after a rather busy wine tasting night, because its only LM downstairs, one busboy, H, and me running my ass off like a loaded pinball game shot, out of the bar, back, around, further, pulling all kinds of moves out with precision and samurai yogi simplicity of motion, serving and clearing, here's the wine discount thing...  The four top, neighbors, friends on Facebook, just back from fantastic travels in Italy, and having brought in the fancy couple, he's tall and French, she's tall too, USA and blond and upper crust, who they've traded Air BnB houses to stay in, an extra song and extra primate recognition dance, has just left the bar, and at this point I'm getting no help and foundering, as another table comes in, and then little Lynshka shows up, telling me that she's bringing in a mutual friend for dinner (and I've just been banned by the boss for coming in on my night off, and about to start mumbling different curse words anyway)...  and I'm still turning and turning, left and right and around, to fend off the enemy chaos...  And Oh Jesus I know how this night is going to turn out, because now I have to turn into, or back into, some personable, conversational and friendly, which I'm not feeling now, and nor do I want an attitude adjustment of a beverage kind...  Lynshka cleans off the bar for me, loads the dishwasher, and I'm dealing with a table that is already a bridge too far...

And soon it turns into an excellent conversation, with our friend Nick, who has taken good care and put his friendship out there for us at a club far from my usual neighborhood with DJ music and rooftop deck, and the world is reconnected, from Persia, Iran, to Crimea, to my own familiarity with restaurant people and 9:30 Club back in the day...  Turns out he would be as happy at a Toby Keith concert than listening to the latest DJ from Barcelona or wherever, though he knows with discriminating taste this music they play at the music club...  Whatever it was, this chat, it is worth the damage and the glass of whisky...


Then it's the Hot Club...  And I get to work with the kid, nice kid, who did not hold back on any info  when the boss called him wondering about how the stove behind the bar was left with a knob open, a potential gas stove burner disaster, mentioning my reaching for a bottle so my old friend from a long way back, my most intellectual friend, Aziz....  the band rounding out the week, pumping along like a Popeye cartoon with their Gypsy Jazz Swing...  and our lovely friend and neighbor Cathy has come in, ordered a bottle of bubbly to mark her husband's birthday who is no longer with us, a hard working lawyer...  She's there still at the bar, at the end of the night after everyone else has packed up, not having finished her bottle, and I talked her into a little bit to eat, crusty boneless pig's feet...  And in order to eat my calves liver, rare, I come around the bar and have a nice chat.  "Your mom did a good job raising you," she tells me, and that's the nicest thing I've heard in a long time.  I change the Pandora station from Cool Jazz to Judy Collins, and when Leaving on a Jet Plane comes on, she remembers seeing her husband off to Vietnam at the airport.  We talk about her background, a bit of the Sicilian, and the eventually the guitar comes out for a little session for the Irish in both of us...  "I love this music.  My kids grew up listening to the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary..."  (The old house was walking distance, short walking distance, to the lawn of Wolftrap.)

The lady is garrulous.  The boss, tall, rises from the table where he was looked over a younger couple, probably European, now that they have left and comes by the bar, and she asks him, what was the first movie he ever saw, and he explains that it was a small and quiet town, a small city back in the South of France, D'Oc, that did not have a movie theater, but he remembers seeing Jungle Book, and he smiles, and says it was the best movie he ever saw, with his quiet polite and manly sense of humor, and my mind, not having any soothe of late, nor a glass yet, goes back to thirty years ago, when, looking back on it, I should have showed up to the college weekend movie night, the very same film shown, but I blew it, I forget what the hell I did, maybe just went back up the hill and fell asleep, and the nice chat from Friday afternoon turned into a total shunning in the dining hall by Sunday brunch...  "I wish I was free of that," I might have said to myself, seeing the sad beauty, the good, the sad, of all deeper conversations, not that they happen very often, and maybe this is why that is basically so...


The next morning the boss texts me a picture of the dirty plate I left behind, left on the little table at the top of the stairs...  He sends it around ten AM, when I'm still out cold, and when I see it, after mom's helper texts me about mom's cable TV bill, action needed, mom had called before that, and the AC somewhere over there in the foreign apartment is whirring...  I can't get up out of bed to do anything more than pee before past Three in the afternoon....

That's how far the plate got in my effort to get everything back in place, the closer, there at the end, turning off the lights to head across to the Safeway...  I talk to my pal Bruce late night checkout aisle 7, about remembering Woodstock, and Jimi and the National Anthem, and another woman who works there sings a few lines from Hendrix with a deeper knowledge, and Bruce played the snare drum in the high school marching band, then an Uber cab home early in the morning.

Okay, so that was it, my worn-out mind body remembers.  I took the gentlemanly act of walking our neighbor down the stairs.  In fact, she stumbled once, on bottom steps, and hurt herself, though it was not us who had served her alcohol of any sort that night.  The lights were low, I got her out and down the stairs, offering to walk her down to the corner, and I've learned a lot, a lot about the neighborhood and her way of life and being in this world, and how she worked with the Shrivers in Special Olympics, and took the Shriver kids to the McDonald's in Rockville a long time ago, paying for it herself with cash from her own pocket, having to drive the big Cadillac, later reimbursed, told by little Maria to go down the hallway and up the elevator and back to the boss, and once seeing Sargent coming by in his business suit, pushed into the swimming pool, throwing out his watch, his wallet, his shoes...

Somewhere in all the riches and fond thoughts and the sharing of memories with this good Catholic feminine spirit from some old country, my brain rewired itself, back into the transporter and holder of the imagination and memory like carrying a good and sacred ring, forgetting to take down, in the darkness, the last dirty plate, mine own...