But there are always other ways of looking at things, happier ways, more productive ways.  Stop blaming people for the choices you make, the situations you endure.  You must be getting something out of them.

No need to go full scale pessimism.

I wake from restaurant dreams.  Women who asking me for a taste of something, back over at their table.  Famous people come in, I recognize them.   But where are the glasses?   Eisenhower sits at the service area of my old bar layout at the original Austin Grill.  I have General Eaker come sit with him, or maybe it's Truman.  We are all friends in this timeless world, all more or less appreciative of our efforts, which with time, the passing of time, are now seen in some strange mathematical almost form of significance.  Maybe Milan Kundera is one of these floating through the dream, I no longer know.

W. Bush, Governor Whitman, Albright, go up the stairs, I wave them in, and nod, I'm quietly, not over going my bounds, a buddy, can say, "hi. good to see you." And for doing this for years, they too nod, to a friend.

Kathy picks me and mom up in her car when we are stranded, she recognizes me.  Touching my heart with her quiet kindness.  It was getting dark out.  We were downtown somewhere, almost losing each other, and she came along, getting the situation immediately, taking us back.

It's a very deep animal sleep.  So deep I cannot almost get out of it.  I am finally putting things together as a writer, deep in my own subconscious, deep with all this stress.

Boss has called two nights ago.  No, Ted, you cannot be a caretaker for you mum.  You'll go crazy, you'll get lost, it's not healthy for you.  They have realized this in France, through however many two thousand centuries of studying things and politely appropriately acting upon them.

Fuck dude, you're right.

But those are only words...

I feel groggy.  The air is dry up in the office full of paper where I sleep.  I'm wake up with a hacking cough, then have no energy to get up.  It's sunny out, but I feel how cold it is through the walls, "feels like" temperatures of 5 degrees.  Mom isn't squealing too much, so I rest, in and out of a similar dream, as if with different chapters.  

I'm supposed to be pouring champagne for someone, but there isn't any that's been stocked.  On and on.  You know people, you're friendly with them, you want to give them good service, a bit of an education, but...  you're overrun.   That's how it goes.

Mom and I are doing okay, and she even gives me some space, staying up in her bed.  The clock change... I'm down in the kitchen, starting on the dishes.  The Revere Ware pot I heated up the chicken stew in last night, is clean, no residue on the sides, but it needs hot soapy water.  The silverware, and the cat food dishes, I put the smaller things in a stackable way in the rubber made tub, spraying with the hose attachment to get rid of the small yucky things.  Then hot water, a good dash of dish liquid, I have my gloves on, tight, yellow, as the cracks on my thumbs have come back painfully needling me in their dryness.  I've got the dishwasher door down, I'll use that as a drying rack.  Get the tea cups and mugs going.  Okay, this will work.

I put my hunting shoes on and cross from the shade to the sunlight, bearing the bird feeder to hang.  The fresh air and the direct light helping with my grogginess.  It feels like I've been fighting off a cold, or some other blow...  what will I do if I get called back to work now?  The winter's not been time to do much around this apartment, much as I'd like to, every day a little battle.

Mom's still upstairs, after I check the mail out front.  I've made a pot of tea.  Oh, there's some bacon I cooked a good few days ago, sprinkled with the good spices, yes, I can reheat these in the toaster over to get the slices and the ends well done and crisped up enough so that mom will like them.  I'll serve them with some sliced turkey, sliced beefsteak tomato, a touch of mayo...  She comes down, in a decent mood, that's what we do.  She's happy with my little deconstructed BLTs.  My belly does not need any more dough anyway.   I ate enough Zatarain's jambalaya rice last night, late, with two hot dogs to cheer my late night peace with mom in bed, probably interfering with my rest, but hey...

The day has no plan.  The boss called a day or two ago.  I'll take mom for a ride.  The clocks have just been changed and the sun is out and the sky is blue.  Get mom to the car.  We're heading out the door, then, goddam, where's my iPhone...  so she's waiting outside and I'm still groggy looking for my phone up and downstairs, and she can't figure it out, though I thought I hit the unlock button on the electronic key fob...

We drive down, I pick up the wine for the next day or two, then on to Big M, a short grocery list, pick up a rotisserie little bird, New York Times, a lemon, a lime, another little bag of pre washed fresh spinach, I don't feel like the stew again, and while we're driving back, mom is "how about we go to the press box.  I'll write you a check when we get home."  No, mom we can't afford it.  I get her back, the car in the parking lot, she's fumbling with her sunglasses, where'd she put her normal reading ones...  I try to help her, but she snaps, "don't you touch me, you bastard," all of a sudden, and I apparently am primed too and shout at her, fuck you too...  Get the groceries in.  Mom tediously makes it back in up the steps.  Sits in the chair, not speaking to me.  I put the stuff away.  Coat zipped back up, I need a walk, even if it's freezing.  And I'm feeling pretty down.  The cat jumped out fo the house as we came in, and I go sit down on the steps down to the parking lot catching some rays from the sinking sun, and the ginger boy cat comes and and rubs up against me, butting his forehead into me, and I give him a good nuzzle or whatever you want to call it.  Rubbing his back, down to the tip of his tails as he marks me as a friend out here.

I come back in, and I'm almost about just to take a hide from mom nap with a little juice glass with some Bardolino in it, when I do the math and figure out it's easier to relent, okay, let's just go out and down to the fucking Press Box, with all the lugging of mom around, but she makes it to the car without the cane, and we have masks and spare masks.  I'm going to need some wine when I get there, glass of Chianti, seven eight bucks a pop...   And when dinner comes, I don't care anymore, I take mom's chicken fajita tortillas and fixings and make my self a fish taco with the coleslaw on top, sweet, gooey, soft, some crunchy, and mom perks up too, and what a great thing a restaurant is.  People are nice to you, there's community.  It's up there with the great monotheistic religions as far the great spiritual inventiveness of the creature.  How could we not live in society without a watering hole, a pub, a sports bar, a bistrot.  Food and drink, a friendly server, a college kid.  Strong men are in town, one with a Civil War long dark brown beard, with strong tattooed arms on him looking like a movie character over in a booth, as I sit with my back against the olden time looking stove in the corner at the two top.  The young woman who fills the pint water glasses, not our server, comes over, and I ask what she's up to, and she's at the college here, and what's she studying, political science, oh great, I just came from Washington DC, and she adds that she wants to go into diplomacy eventually, and I say, well, I used to wait on the guy who's negotiating peace with the Taliban, and Madeline Albright, "you're Czech? we like Czechs here, they like their wine..."  and I ask her what languages she's going to pick up, and she says, German, and I go, enshuldinginsie Bitte, and she says, she hasn't learned any yet, and that she's also going to study Arabic.   Cool.  She goes away with her water pitcher, and mom tells me that I'm good with people.

There are good things to the restaurant business, from working in them my best productive up and coming and then fading and down years as I grew in wisdom.  Unlike construction, you don't have to live on the road throughout the working year in hotels.  

But there are those nights too amongst the olive trees at night, troubled about the higher powers forsaking you, Gethsemane style, Old Testament prophet style, brutal shit, the world falling out from beneath your feet, God I'm fucked, style.  There's no happy answers, no easy answers, and your own mind will even add to it all, perhaps through the very and possibly troublingly flawed concept of spiritual journeys and the like, leaving people like me and perhaps even Jesus lumped into the category of the Shakespeare Clown along the edges of the tapestries of human drama and strivings and tragicomical comical tragedies, sort of like wise children with an almost better sense of ever-earthy humor and perspective.

You do have to ask yourself the grim questions, some of them professional in nature, what do you want to do with your life now, where do you want to live, maybe the city just wasn't the best place, the most suitable to your nature...

Oh, but we're all adaptable...  aren't we?

Those of us who invented the restaurant, and who tried to represent it, to bring it forward in it's most purest form, the miracle of the good dish, the good wine, all of it making humanity a bit happier and at home with themselves, to make it the most pure form, beyond all touch of that world of Yelp ratings, etc., who with flesh and blood, tooth and nail, back, foot, a family tradition, a certain Old World temperament, there tends to be sacrifice in it all.

And a certain point in life, hmmm, it is worth it?  Don't I prefer being outside, to feel the sunset upon my flesh...

Between the years of 25 and 55, boy, I served a lot of food and beverage.  I was there, the regular guy behind the bar, for whole neighborhoods in their play, and the small mistakes I made still bring anguish to me, the look on a woman's face when I tentatively said, I'm afraid I shouldn't serve you, taking her for a crazy we'd dealt with in recent memory, except it wasn't her, and that one sheep, to loose, to see the look on her face as she left with her company or her party or her date, (I'm sure they served her when she got to the table) is enough to convince me about the one lost versus the other ninety nine, let me tell you, twenty five years later, I still see her face.

But I put my body and soul into incalculable margaritas, frozen, one the rocks, specially hand made, tacos al carbon, fajitas, enchiladas, burritos, queso, salad...  corn soup.  "Corn Shzchup!" as Jose Andres, then Jose Ramon would say with his bespectacled little brother many moons ago, margarita in hand at the bar, with Rob Wilder there to escort him.

Then I served wine and just about the best kind of French cooking you could find, I have to say, and that food too having come out of a sort of dream I had, from old Don Quixote like cooking books and guides to Paris bistrot guides from the 1950s...  a rare book found at McMurty's, before it was a fancy garden shop and then a Brooks Brothers and then nothing...

And oh, all the characters, the entire world coming to the doorstep.  Buddhist monks in town with the Lama, unannounced, coming in their saffron robes and sitting at the back round booth at the old Austin Grill back by the kitchen doors, and one had an instinctive with to wait on them, this informing me too of the wisdom of life you cannot put into words or text books, more meant for greater books, books full of chapters of the greater truths that sit below the consciously logical explanations, things which the practical people, like the older brother will often come along and explain the rational logic, thereby dismissing the bulk of all you stand for, or much of it, why you felt the need to bow before these peaceful quiet men who came out of a sort of business man shuttle van.  They had a handler.  I couldn't really explain to them that not long before Joe Ely and a bunch of scruffy looking road musicians had come in to dine at the same table... near the same time, these robed and shaved head gentlemen ordering iced tea and burritos, some even with beef, and I felt obliged to tell them that the refried bean burritos have a good amount of pork lard in them, and that the black beans were vegetarian, and they still ordered the regular ones, and even a beef burrito, and maybe even a chicken chimichanga.  Monks gone wild...

But you know, no boss every really comes up to you and says, Ted, fucking Ted, beautiful Ted...   Business manners decree that they are obliged to walk past you, almost not wishing to see the details of what your generous Christian Buddhist Jewish I won't dis-include Muslim or Hindu or any savage habit of hospitality might venture to include.  Going into the office.  They the managers and the owners have stresses beyond what I could even ever imagine.  So it could only be a little footnote.  No one is perfect.  Let's not get sentimental.

But of course no one can depart far enough from their own, their own egos, their own sense of adding to the greatness of life, the wish to sit in the front rows of any night...  The quiet monks of the world will gather and go about their work anyway.

I remember the quietness of all the faces I was allowed to soothe.  Uli.  

Tears inside from all that time, and all the genuine love back and forth.  One day I will go back.

But, what it comes down to is far more not the brute way of life, the aggression, the selfishness, the force of clever business instincts and doings that make life what it is and can be for all of us, speaking as a community.

And now I am getting to be a crazy old man, there's a Francis of Assisi in our communications, the only thing that matters now.  I see it, the deeper level, the way I talk to the cat, put some hydrogen peroxide on the little bumpy scab he has near his neck, applied with a paper towel as he's at the back door wanting to go out.  Right side of neck, near shoulder blade.  I sit and let it soak on him and he starts to purr, getting that I am soothing his small wounds, and thank god it's not a tick anyway, and he has had his rabies vaccine.