Put the water on.  The water comes to a boil as I talk to mom on my cell in the bathroom.  I take the tea water off as it whistles, pouring the water into a cup with a dandelion root tea bag.  There is some loose leaf dragonwell still in the bag, not much, powdery, but it will do, and I set the timer.  I've already poured out some chicken stew from the refrigerator into a bowl, the bowl into the toaster oven, broil, 225.

The tea is ready, my cell phone alarm buzzing, so I lift the strainer out, draining the little basket with the tea.  Later, the orange water kettle is empty, so I pour water from the Britta pitcher into it, and then I pour the water from the Pur water filter pitcher into the Britta water filter pitcher, and then I run the tap for a little while before pouring water into the top compartment of the Pur filter.  It takes time for the water filters, which are the replaceable ones, longer for the Pur.  There is a rust colored residue that builds along the slender rims on the top of the water filter pitchers where water might sit and dry.  

With breakfast warming, and mom settled down and prepared to accept that she is in her proper place, I sit down on the couch before the coffee table, putting my iPhone connected with the charger, and I open up my laptop and connect it via the iPhone's Personal Hotspot.  The toaster oven makes a tiny click of groaning expansion as the heating elements come on and off.  I live with the miracles of modern life and technology.

I made a conscious effort not to drink wine last night, even as I came in and plopped my body down on the old couch.  I tasted a few wines I was unfamiliar with, the Corsican wine we will be pouring for the complementary Tuesday wine tasting, and the Chateau Villars, a Fronsac, 2011, as the Italians did not finish it quite.  But just sips, and I even got to the grocery story on a cold night after the long Saturday night shift.  The last copuple, who were slow on leaving, along with the four Spanish women chattering on--I turned the lights up, I put on Irish music, and then  I finally turned even the Irish music off, eating a piece of calves liver, sitting at the bar even--but finally they all too left and I did the tip adjustment, put in the numbers for the tip out report, etc., poured the dishwasher, Jules, from Cameroon, a last glass of sparkling wine, pour la route, before he caught his bus, and I was out of there.

The night hadn't started out all that pleasantly, with an emotional old mother calling with her barbs and mysteries of her own misery, but I had missed the call, walking to work, distracted by running  into a neighbor, and when I called back the phone rang on or there was a busy signal...  Something she said, made me worried.  "A friend of mine died..."  Who?  Not a great way to go into work...  and everyone there in the servers, particularly A. with whom I will be working with, seems in a tight mood.  Hugo, the faithful old busboy, and Jean Baptiste, they are nice to me, and Marie Rein says hi...

I contact Mom's helper, in that time period when I assess the bar and its stock, wines into the buckets and sink to be chilled properly and white wines opened and ready to go to keep up the night's demands...  Yes, she'll be able to go and check in on mom, great.  I gather things, put them into readiness, I change...   As the shift nears lights camera action, 5:30, after we're fed our tilapia and rice and I finally get through to Mom around 5:20 as I'm brushing my teeth, good news, Joan K. hasn't died, and the poor beaten down old abandoned mother seems to be alright and the phone is working, so...  with that pressure off I tell my coworker A. that I "like working with Ivan."  "Well, he had to do everything," she says, meaning Wednesday's hectic jazz night, when we were quite busy.  Whatever.  "I wasn't feeling well," is all I say, after a pause.  I'm not going to take the bait.  I'm taking my antibiotic Amoxicillin-Clav and my Benzonatate cough pills, and when the door opens at 5:30 up the stairs comes the British couple and I've not seen the Mrs. in a while, and it's Chinese New Years.    We will be full up and running by 7.  Just keep moving, get the first customers down and a drink to start.  Get in the dig, and wait for the reaction, is how some people work.  But I know who I am, and that I work hard and do as good a job as possible.  There is my liver to take care of, and in the last few days, I've been doing well by that too.

I drink my tea, with a dash of Ashwagandha powder, and thank god for chicken stew which is tasting better now every day since I made it Thursday.

Every day now, I make a stew.   One has no fear, no worries, making a stew.  Give it time, follow simple steps, add the ingredients in their stages together...  The cut meat tells us when it is ready to be turned by when it no longer sticks to the heated pan.   Vegetables are cut under the eye of what will be a good size to savor in the spoon.  The vegetables sweat, releasing their moisture as their qualities and flavors concentrate.  The nose, simply, tells us when the taste of doneness is at hand.  

And there are tried and true methods, developed over time, handed down from beyond memory, the sear, the aromatics, the spice, the good use of wine as flavor stimulant...

The zucchini, added last to the pot, after the red wine, inexpensive Cabernet from the South of France, after the tomato sauce and the bone broth stock, is cut in larger pieces, as they will tender easily, and then, after the bubbling yields to steam, the pot is set.

The Bible is full of poetry, and poetry of the deepest sort.  How could a person raised in that tradition not want to try the writing hand in their own possession, and how could they long avoid those things which set alight their own creative eyes as they mulled their way through toil, so to get to the deeper things.

I had been ill since the holidays, I think, more or less.  I let the body fend for itself, nursing it when I could, but there was stress, there was Restaurant Week, and upon it came a hacking cough I could not get rid off.  Finally, a day off, to schedule, and then the next day to visit the proverbial doctor, the nurse practitioner, walking home finally, such as it was, with medicine.

And with the medicine, an antibiotic, one should not indulge too much in the fruit of the vine, and really, I needed a break from that too, such that I am now able to be up and not in too deep a state of gloom and worry, pressured by the march of work...

So too did the season allow me, in my illness, to embrace things that are hard, given our modern skeptic artificial intelligence what-is-your-password times...  I read Father Merton, and James Martin, S.J., I took out the DVDs of Father Barron's Catholicism series, for those who don't have the chance to travel to the Holy Land and the world's great churches.  I took quiet time, for myself.  I meditated.  I sort of prayed.  I was not feeling good, about anything, but sometimes, this is how it has to be, cloudy, before a picture clears and makes sense again in all its widespread elements.

I cannot see a single line or passage or sermon or parable Jesus is reported to have said without seeing a myriad of deeper meanings, and quite oddly and powerfully, they speak most directly, to my own mind, my own work.

Jesus, the son of the tekton, a tekton himself...  the son of a college professor of botany, and in this world, holy to some extent, a man of an open table "fellowship," not far away from a barman in this today world of the modern city's employment offerings...  no one in the modern city being that far from a publican, a sinner, a go-go dancer, an escort, a conniver, a lawyer, a person blind and sick, cut off, a prodigal son, a stress-out tippler, an arms merchant...

Hemingway liked the world of Europe, its cafe life, its fiestas and gatherings.  He understood men of hospitality, he understood bullfighters, and how they disliked the city traffic and noise as they went off to work.  He understood work, not in the least in that he understood it as the ground spring of the mental juices that yield their poetry, bright living flowers out of the dirt of manual labor and the work of fisherman.

The story of Jesus gathering his fisherman to do their poetic work is itself a poem of how the good thoughts, the ones we call "creative" ones, the ones that satisfy us, come into being, through the small faithful act of putting away the distractions to find the act of discerning the divine.  This tale alone catches us right there, and we must then follow.



The saintly, or at least good spiritual, in some ways, Catholic minds, are there in the writing world as much as anywhere...  The literary career, aptly viewed, is a spiritual one.


"But you still have to go off to work today, don't you..."

I know full well that I am a Prodigal Son.  And I have been preaching the wrong message, and must aim to correct myself now.