This has to be the worst part of the ragweed season here.

I've opened the PDF on assertiveness from the email from my therapist.  It's night out, I'd like to go to bed, but it's necessary reading.

Mom is calling now.   And I barely feel like getting up out of bed, and I have to go work tonight.  Robbed of energies.

Is is that I've told her about my new friend, Betsy...

Mom throwing her manipulations at me, my ill mind thinks, a new depression to go along with the physical feeling...

No, I have not been assertive.  I've been passive.  I've not stood up.  And that's why, so it seems, my wants and needs are not so highly respected, secondary things in the family brew...

The phone rings at 3 AM.  I'm in a dream.  "But someone was supposed to come here...  Here I am all alone in this place...  What am I going to do about the cat?"

7AM.  10AM.  12:30PM.  "What am I supposed to do?  Isn't any body going to come and take me out to lunch.."

She calls at 2:30, apologetically.  I'm just getting up.  I feel like utter shit.  Saturday afternoon, my Monday morning.  "I'm sorry," she says.  She's feeling better.  I see in my reflection huge deep bags under my eyes.

Once, If I'd have been assertive, just once, came up with that just once, it would have been different with the old princess...

I get to work.  Painstakingly and without break, I set up the bar.   The windows have been left wide open.  The dayshift server, L.M., is taking a nap on the banquette.  I shut all the windows, from front to back.  I turn on the front window AC unit, a mini-fridge with a big white dryer type tube.  Humidity has entered, along with mosquitoes.  L. is back in the office.  I assume she has the window AC unit on back there too.  The thermostat on the main AC unit reads 77.  The AC unit above the entrance of the Wine Room, it beeps as I turn it on.

The door is opened, and the bar is well-set up for whatever will happen here on a Saturday night with a full reservation book.  (With one busboy.)  5:30, the door opens, and up the stairs right then a couple comes in, as I'm sitting at the bar, writing down the specials on the little paper pad that will fit in my breast shirt pocket.  I let a minute pass, before looking up at them.  Sir, can we take a table.  They've been looking around, admiring the Van Gogh Night Cafe mural on the wall as you come upstairs.  Oh, god.  Already....  Yes, that second table there is fine.  Server x, who will be working with me tonight, comes upstairs, four minutes later, after I bring them menus with a grunt.  "Ted." She says.  "No tastings tonight."  "I know.  Not an idiot.  I've been doing this job for years," I say, unable to keep my voice from raising.

Displeased, she waits on the table.  I hear the order, for two glasses of Bordeaux, and tap water, having to open the bottle.  Then she looks into her phone.

It will hit at seven.  At 6:30, the first party arrives, not we don't like the low table by the window, setting off a ripple effect of seating confusion, and then all the parties arrive in close sequence and extra ones at the bar.  And soon one is moving so fast and in all directions, water orders, cocktails, wine, specials, as to forget the invisible invader pulling full weight on the immune system...



Later, after her silently not appreciating anything about me for about a week of shifts, as I come in on a Sunday, server tells me, she was being sarcastic.  Oh, coulda fooled me.  But that's how it goes, and it's good to be friends again, the weight removed, "life's too short," as they say.

My bad.  5:30 on a Saturday evening, not always ready with sunshine.