Waiting, waiting...  I've been waiting all night.  J showed up, a pleasant surprise, someone to help me out up at the wine bar.  Moral support, I hardly get these days, too much estrogen at work, everyone else perfect.  Took him two hours to drive in from Annapolis.  Construction, weekend...  We get the first few sat, but soon enough he's up and downstairs, helping them out, the two women servers, Lm, and MR, and there is one busser between the two floors, or, in our case, upstairs, a food runner.  It slows, and I walk my beat, two four tops out front, a four top in back, who ordered Negronis to start, cool, except I had to run down to the basement for the liquor room as there was no sweet vermouth on the rail..., while a nice couple we had conversed with--she's from Turkey--was getting ready to go and another couple is getting impatient at the bar for a glass of wine perhaps, but you have to take things in order, and J has disappeared down the stairs at an inopportune time, that's how it always is, as she shores up the service downstairs.


Finally, the parties have reached the dessert point, except for the four in the wine room, and then, and then, here comes MR, leading an older couple and five younger people up the stairs, pitching to the seven top arriving at 9PM, that they should sit upstairs, even though there is table space that's just opening up down in the main dining room.   This is awkward, because they wanted to sit downstairs, but the party has made the false the conclusion that sitting up here is somehow easier on everybody, agreeable, Catholic types, with grown children.  I'm jee-hawing the back tables around to put four in a row.

Soon, by the time I'm coming back from having watered the seven, MR is seating another table, a two top, quite happily and agreeable, and oh, I'm so nice I'm going to take your water order...  I'm so French, agreeable, polite, confident, detached, disappearing.

And how many times has this happened.  MR sticking the upstairs with the last tables, and this is much farther away from the kitchen... the thought burning in my mind and growing bigger.


I don't even want to be writing about his.  Day two, headed to work, and I'm already tired.  I'd rather be writing about something else, say, our little perspectives, looking back on the universe, all things, consciousness...

But I am too irritated...

Up, I call my mom, round 2;30, having made coffee in the little Bialetti, only green tea is in little bags, flavorless...

It ate at their souls, their health, my mom tells me, about her parents, who worked in the restaurant business.

Yes, she warned me.  She cried, and told me it would break my heart, and I was still a very young man then, and I did little about it.



Monday, at work, I'm dragging, and MR shrugs off my concern of her promoting the upstairs for any diner after nine PM.  "They sit where they want to sit," in her carefree laissez faire way...  Perfect common sense, but of course.

The boss, who dressed me down for coming in at 9:45, has dinner with his family back in the wine room, keeping me with a dessert order at 10:15.  And I feel the great pointlessness of my trying to be personable with them.  Stone.

The restaurant business, abuse of a depressive, down on his academic luck, caught for a moment having a bad attitude...