The night of Michael's Fiftieth Birthday Party arrives, 14 people in the back room, already set with a table cloth, on a Tuesday in early March, wine tasting and bottle discount night, the tasting wine a chardonnay from Limoux in the Pays D'Oc.  I'm told, by Leelee, after she rises from her mid-shift nap quiet time back on the banquette in the wine room, largely pregnant, that Jerome has called in sick, that there will just be us, the two servers tonight.  The boss will help out with the party.  I groan, quietly and inwardly.

And here we are in the first real week of the Corona Virus Covid-19 melt down.



The next day I am awake early again, don't really feel like getting up, have jazz night to look forward to, and I get up in this limbo feeling bad somehow about the night before, short staffed, and I brew a pot of Dragonwell Tea as I always do.  Bah, what to do with this day...  I sip my tea.  Mom's phone is off the hook, okay, well, at some point...

I take an allergy pill, a Benadryl, that's all I have at the moment, and finally, later on, the sneezes subside, and I dress and go out for a walk.  It's not warm out, and the sun is muted by sheep sort of clouds, breaking through now and again, and after crossing the road, and getting my feet out into the field, walking toward the river bluff, I begin to feel better.  Tired, I walk slowly.  In a state of I don't know.  But I persevere, make it to the little soft grove of pine trees, then eastward along the yard, sinking, and then rising again, looking down at the blades of grasses, little colonies of shoots, such as I saw under the moonlight after a long Monday night shift.  The river is a sort of green color, the daffodils have come out in strength.  The sun shines, shines on my body, and I begin to feel better, just walking slowly.  "We need 'ya, we need 'ja, we need 'ja," a bird, a cardinal, female, signals up in a tree, peeping after sending her bright message to the day lit world, and then a small light colored dog held on a leash by a small old woman from East Asia barks seriously out of his mind from twenty yards away at me, and I stand in the narrowed clearing and wait for them to pass out of range, before I walk along the path of the old trolley tracks back westward parallel to the river.


A strange job, sometimes, often, a kind of professional purgatory, and one says, "wasted years."  And then adds, "oh well, must be in my genes, all of this," though it does not feel always like a well-mannered and elegant place to be, being the son of college professors, no, the night shifts, the life you fall into.  There is a studious quality to it.


I'm going to pass back up to the avenue and visit my friends at the little market, get some cold cuts, turkey and roast beef, a small plastic container of curried chicken salad, a dozen eggs, kleenex, a roll of paper towels, a roll of toilet paper for back-up, but to the east, as I'd planned my walk as I pause my walk at the top of the little hill, seeing the steeples of Georgetown University, and the skyscrapers of Rosslyn in the distance, a crew of men outside the modern house have a team of leaf blowers going on high, so I go back, west, back toward the Urban Ecology Center and up through the field.



In God's image.  What is a human being anyway?  Have we forgotten, as the landscaping crew makes its noise and a contractor of the gutted square brick roofless house with the flexible construction fence around the dug-up yard talks with a woman who is presumably the owner, turned away from me near the portopotty as I watch life, not having much of a one, waiting around, for a therapy session over a smartphone, then back to work, should probably go in early, things to straighten out from the long and complicated evening of Michael of Dennis and Michael's fiftieth, and my friend Purnell showing up late after nine for a bit to eat as I keep it together, harried, as I've been for much of the evening.


What is "man," a human being, anyway, what is the creature, what does being in God's Image mean, and all of that seems forgotten as the urban area, cars stopped below me in single file in bound on Canal Road, bustles, insidiously, to my mood as I walk, though gradually I am indeed refreshed by the sunlight and the slow movements of walking my flesh and bones and tired musculature and my potbelly from too much dough since Monika's little neighborhood party, the little quiches I ate as I enjoyed wine and a conversation with her.

I'm going to feel tired, at some point, before work, in need of a nap, but I don't know when.  God give me an easy night.  And please let there be enough business so that we can make some money and stay afloat in this business, no one knowing really what's going to happen...



I take a little nap, setting an alarm for the therapy session at one PM, which I don't have much enthusiasm or desire for, just another conversation, basically just me trying to help out another human being through the great pretense that we all belong to this world of business.  And I get a text from the boss, "not busy, you can stay home, thank you."  I am tired, and not feeling well.  The tree pollen has gotten to me.  Fine.  I'll miss a point of the tip pool, which doesn't strike me as fair, but that's how it goes.  I worked hard last night.  Meanwhile the tip pool is watered down by the absence of the daytime busser, who had a heart attack, so that now there are two servers claiming a point toward the tip pool, (and on Monday, the total gratuity amount was $80 for lunchtime.)  Oh, well.  What can you do.  Not anyone's fault.

Was the boss catching my frustration, observing it on my face as I cut some bread for one of the front tables, amidst the confusion of administering the potential wine tasting, getting the birthday party's wine order psyched out, the first cocktails for the first to arrive...  He pitched in, took the order for the party, saw it through, poured out the magnum of Roederer Champagne, helped run the food, so eventually I have nothing to complain about, but just that it was a confused night of service, who is doing what, many different directions, and the busboy is busy with something downstairs...  "Did you get their coffee order yet," he asks, and I'm just back from the two-top in the corner, a woman I've slowly made friends with who visits from time to time, sorting out their coffee and dessert and after dinner drink order combined as I also deal with Purnell and his wife, their dinner order, having presented a little round of tastings.  "No, I haven't."  I say this with more calm than what I might have mustered earlier.  There's an end somewhat reasonably in some distant sighting.

There is evil in the world, no doubt, I conclude, as I tiredly sift through the little things I come across on the social media pages of my sensitive and intelligent virtual friends.  The Catholic vibrations have been coming at me steadily, and I come across a little piece on Padre Pio and his stigmata (on a website Aleteia English), and it leads one to other little articles about how to pray and so forth.  Well, who am I to deny such things as the efficacy of prayer and little stories of those who were good at it.  Good medicine anyway, good for the faith that enables one with the calm to make it through times of trouble and uncertainties for the mind to angst over.  A suspension of disbelief.


Life is a great confessional, and there are any number of things to confess.


Truly it is good to have the night off, though it is not a comfortable one.  I am indeed ready for resting on the couch, falling asleep.  The allergy could go further, allowing for the Covid-19 to find its way in.  And beyond this, the thing has arrived, spreading this way.  A fit of sneezing comes over me.  It's Wednesday.  I'm supposed to back at work Sunday.  But what will business be like?  What will happen to my livelihood?  And if I am ill, should I be going on the road up to see my old mom at the beginning of the week after the next for her birthday?   A contagion not to be passed to the elderly, by all reports.


I dream on the couch.  A regular customer, I'm out with him, and we've gone for a drive, over the old hill from my old hometown, across to another valley, as if going to Deansboro, or Vernon Center, Knoxboro, a little town first up on the high ground, the top of the farmland, but then dropping down into the village at the valley floor, a town like in the Pyrenees, with ample water running through it, and little cafes, all of which surprising me, and interesting, and we find a place to park, but I feel like there is something devilish to this customer of mine, a good friend, in that I should be spending the time I have up here checking in and taking care of my old mom who raised me all this way.  There are distractions in life;  and you give an inch, a mile will be taken, and there you are, helping to find parking, knowing you're in for it, the lunch, the swindle, the chatting up of the locals and the dames in the little surprisingly urban local spots on into nighttime in supposed pleasure and humor, all the while, feeling an irresponsibility growing not lessening.

One coughs.  My god, is this it?  Are my lungs feeling fibrous now?  How will I pay the rent?

Yes, so after another bout of long rest on another day off, waking in the middle of the night, I allow my curiosity to take hold, and where it was Miles Davis on PBS, The Birth of Cool, my mind is following Padre Pio on to a YouTube search for his story.  Churchmen lead uncluttered lives, and I can't even find the thermometer I thought I had here at the new apartment, not that it seemed to work very well, as I remember.

The priesthood, viewed in times of trouble, rises forward to the professional eye, a way for males of less worldly ambitions, being of a more patient disposition toward somethings inspirational in nature, as if they stood as natural interpreters, with less patience for being stuck somewhere in bureaucracies but feeling themselves inherently clever enough to rise through and upward, a way for the male of the species to be useful even when he might not naturally be, given him a bestowed honor from within and without which he could not otherwise have...

Dostoevsky, yes, as any writer knows, the man hated electric lights.  He liked the dark quiet hours of night.  Candles.  Perhaps he didn't even like the bustle of harsh daylight, particularly in cities.  He did not like, in other words, time, the immutable inevitable relentless passing of hours, so that just when one had achieved some calm moment of peace and flow of inspirations and meditations, then daylight had to come knocking, and the sound of carriages and voices and shouting, all the activities that must be done, the taking out of trash, the daily puffing up of the self-important people with self-important cars driving in, calls, shouts, machine noise...  And here, Dostoevsky, a nervous man, a sick man, an ill man, a man whose liver hurts, found a need (after the death of his little boy) to seek out the priest man in the monastery, an act of faith.  From which is taken the sketches that flesh out with meat and bone the final point of all his work, Karamazov.  A flooding wind, as he puts it, in his author introduction, at the release of his chops.


You cannot worry, you cannot let anxiety get the best of you, you just have faith to keep.  The lesson of Padre Pio, as it seems to be at this hour, in this time.