"Go live some life," my therapist tells me.

I tell her, through the screen of my iPhone, perched upward above the laptop, supported by a bottle of soda water, about my visit up north, to see my mom, in early February.   The weather...  of all my regrets, how they came in to haunt me heavily during the visit.  The failure at becoming a musician, a dance man, a theater type...  Talent is a difficult thing.  In the crush to be a successful English major, to address every poem or short story with understanding, the talents, the guitar, were hidden rather than developed.

Later, I wonder, at all the literary posturing and striving of back then, a search for a career, and perhaps, that was my gut sense, to focus on the one terrible talent with its odd place in life, somehow awkward, unwelcome, but necessary to the life of the mind, for the very purpose of leaving a record of thought.   You pay a price for a literary life.

"Go live some life," get out there, play early Beatles songs, play your version of U2, Forty...  Hank Williams...  Try some improv, or some amateur theater, she suggests...


After the session, I am tired.  Still sore from Tuesday night, could have used another hour of rest...  But I get to the bus, climbing up, beeping my metro card with a nod to the driver, then back and up to first seat on the back platform, slumping into my seat...

I get to work, and the bar doesn't look bad, and that helps, stocked well, organized.  With back-ups.  They'll benefit from my work Valentine's Day dinner service.  Through having to move, stand up and wait for my stop on the bus, from the walk up the hill by the old mansion on 34th rising above the grand trees and the sloping yard, high two storied white porch and mansion brick, the body warms up, and I'll be ready to move like Harold Lloyd, or Buster Keaton, or Charlie Chaplin when the moment to move arises.  I come in through the basement, past the chef at his desk, past the pantry of the pastry chef, listening to his country music, the walk-in cooler and the linens shelf behind me now, up past the ice machine, mineral water boxes stacked after a drop off along with the soda six packs, the women of the kitchen getting ready for the salad stations...

Tilapia and rice, for the staff meal.  I get my plate ready, call mom from downstairs, and she picks up, so I take my plate upstairs and sit at the bar for a quick chat



The pace is fast, and efficient, none of the gaps that come from being over-seated opening up, but for a little crack here and there, manageable, a need for some wine explanations out on the first table of the wine room, table 60, an African gentleman, two ladies...  they go with Sancerre...  speak in amiable French at my little act...

And later on, after the dust is risen, and now in the proverbial air, my friend, a patron of the jazz, arrives for dinner, and she is here with an eye toward a belated celebration of my birthday.  She has a little present for me in a little classy gold-toned gift bag, with some appropriate wrapping paper within, what could it be.  You should open it now, she says.

And when I do, it's one of those German wine openers, immaculate brushed metal, with the two-prongs, and the simple pull handle once you get it seated.  I've never been able to get these ones to work for me, actually.   They are excellent, necessary for pulling out old corks that might crumble, as when opening a rare old Bordeaux...  And then she has brought out and placed on the bar before me a special shaped bottle of red, a Haut Brion, a 1999, at that.

Oh, man, you should'n't have, I mumble to myself...  I've got the bill ready for the kibbutz couple, regulars on Wednesday, but it can wait.  And so, I come around, to my friend, Leslie, you'll have to show me, walk me, through this.  But I do it myself, putting the longer prong in between cork and bottle neck, then the shorter end, and kind of back and forth until the prongs are in all the way, and now you swivel the cork around, and viola, it's moving, and then out it comes, hooray.  I've got the candle and the decanter ready to go, and by the end, there are indeed cloudy dregs, not much, but enough to stop pouring, and then I get the bill ready and swipe the card for my friends...  bid them well.  Ask what they're doing for the Valentine holiday...

Where's your glass, I pour her out a small amount, and then for myself, just a little.  Get her set-up for dinner...  Mineral water....

The boss comes by, Leslie offers him a sip, and they have a nice conversation about the old Bordeaux on our list....  "Do you have any Petrus," he asks her, as I run back and forth in and out of the bar.  The year of my birth, 1965, was not a good vintage, and neither was hers, but followed by good vintages, she tells me, a factoid humor.


Later on, I pull out my dish of veal cheeks, and sit down next to her, as the last two, a dear friend of mine and her second cousin, visiting from London--all Iranians are good at math, they tell us, and Leslie too is a mathematician of note--have all left.

Ted, it's in one of the Mitvot, after the story of Abraham, the mitzvah of hospitality...  Abraham is talking with God, and travelers come by, and Abraham interrupts, even, to be hospitable...

A good friend of hers, a nice guy, a jazz guitar local, a lawyer by profession, a kindly one, passed away suddenly at 66 last August, from cancer...  She tells me.  When one door closes, another opens, she tells me.  And I'm stupid enough, an oaf, turned around a few times in the maze of the jazz night service and the band's strange presence as sort of third-customers, to not quite get the implication, asking her.   The mind can do strange things.  I say, "yes, someone I haven't seen in months will pop into my mind, and then in a few days or so, boom, I see them coming up the stairs..."  She calls it "conjuring," and knows what I am talking about, through her own experience, and in the quiet at the end of the night, with cool jazz playing on the sound system, a note of good sense falls upon the existence of life as we know it.


Later on, it dawns on me....  This is what gets me about the proverbial Erica, the Princess of Cornbird from old college days so long ago, my failings at my true calling, how my hospitality toward another human being was lacking significantly, not that there were not mixed signals.

Imagine, at my first attempts at hospitality, I failed...