January birthday, Restaurant Week, Saturday night shift, could be in contention for worst.

Yoga, a lifting away from the self's illusions, seems to help.

Restaurant Week plus Jazz Night at Bistrot of the Dying Gaul plus Washington, DC attitude equals worst.

Mastroianni played being a waiter, to my knowledge, once, later in life, as a set up for a Chekhovian story directly based on the famous short story about the lady and the pet dog.  I've played waiter, in particular bartender, for, oh, about twenty five years.  I have great respect for one of the great actors for even trying, portraying a lovable loser, a real human being.  I've loved Chekhov as long as I've read him.  And sometimes I find flickers of him.

People in Washington DC, at least of the affluent and successful sort, are the kind to kick you when you're down.  On top of the people who come in during Restaurant Week to make sport of being negative diners intent on writing negative tomes on Yelp, nitpicking, asking such questions as "what is the texture of your flan like," and finding fault with the answer after they've asked twenty other stupid questions, even as their martini arrived right as they sat, on top of those people, on top of the Jazz Night  I'll just drop by without a reservation people with a crowd of South Americans, you get those two ladies:  What does the trout come with?  (Lady, you've had it twenty times.)  Can I directly confirm that the kitchen, a floor and a dining room away, has sautéed spinach tonight as a vegetable at this moment (I end up picking up my cell and calling the restaurant itself to get the answer)?  The snob comes out.

You are busy and sweating profusely, trying to grab what you can, and here come the questions, grilling the waiter, a roll of the eyes in great disappointment as you run from decanting a Madiran for that one Italian guy sitting by himself who is himself beginning to be a bit of a maintenance issue to run downstairs to grab a Cahors for the Argentines, such that you have to stop and go back and ask, okay, what can I do for you, when you are not seated in my section anyway…

I'm reminded of waiting, on just such a busy day, on a famous NPR journalist with a helmet of lady hair.  "The mussel soup, is it a parmantiere?" she asks loftily, chin raised, going in for the kill with her stare, as if to say, I know more than you, imbecile waiter.  Mr. Lehrer, and his wife, on the other hand were a joy to wait on, bringing brightness, stories, questions, humanity and a democratic kindness.  For him I was not a sorry punk loser, but John F. Kennedy about to field a question, or so, at least, I was able to feel one night, and he knew his stuff.

Two at the bar turn to an older gentleman, establish he's worth talking to by Washington standards, and soon the three are talking glowingly about their dogs.  His salmon entree arrives first.  "But how could I come before these ladies who've ordered before me," Mr. Ambassador intones with a great flourish.  I'll only look like an idiot trying to explain how orders queue up in kitchen logic of appetizer and entree and that particular sometimes dicey thing called 'firing' which means telling the chef basically, 'okay, they're about to finish their appetizers, and now, yes, I really need the main event to show up.'  He's a nice enough guy, slips me a twenty before he goes.  I appreciate his sense of humor.  I hear him admit he got a C at a fine institution for his language studies.  He tells better stories than I, one about how LBJ, to keep things even, insisted that American wines be served at American embassies, in Spain for instance.

The night drags on.  Italian guy has worked where they make Ferraris.  He's been a somm himself.  He ends up hanging on, politely, but not paying his check, only finally finally, long after everyone has left. That's okay.  I'm a legend of hospitality.  But on the other hand he's been around since six, has seen how weeded out the   I've been.  We talk about sulfites.  It's all good.  It's all exhausting.

I got into the business only because I was a writer.  I was hungry, thirsty, I needed a social life, home cooking, good decent basic people around me, and many have gone on to get, as I should have, a Ph.D.    I didn't know it would drag on so long, that the poetry I'd write would be stuck like honey around the marauding bear.

"Dear friends, all is lost, all is lost," I want to say after such a night to those who would read.  And I can taste too what might drive a person of some gift to look upon people and see them as a faithless generation difficult and sad to tolerate, addressing them as "ye."

The daily commute…

How many times have I walked home along Q Street after work well after midnight.  Tonight in a fog, witnessed out the restaurant's windows, I walk out into the night, past Dumbarton Oaks, past Montrose Park, its gas lamps receding into the din where ship ropes were wound, down the hill, Everymay, then the turn onto Q.  The same thing.  Coming home after work, hiking, to save money instead of a cab, to not wait for the bus, a way to relax, get fresh air, unwind with all the keyed up adrenaline from a shift controlling the traffic on a micro level, exercise for the ticker, but always alone.  Always with the vision, like you might have from working a Saturday night, of the world out for dinner with friends and spouses replete with cocktails.  What do you do?  Everyone's gone to bed.  You go home, eat something, watch tv, have your own glass of wine.  And the clock plays its own trick on you, with silly hours hard to believe, a four, a three, a six and no clear signs of sleepiness.

A bus goes by, another one, as I walk.  I remember a nice conversation with a D2 driver.  I walk past a spot where a raccoon, mortally hit in the street, still growled and twitched its tail with the last reflexes of life.  Further ahead, much more recently, a buck stood one night on the lawn in front of an apartment building.  Across the street before the bridge, a neighbor, a general's wife, had, she pointed out once, years ago, lived up there in an apartment with Doolittle's wife during the war.  And I've walked home along Q Street for a long time with nothing changing, the same job, the same duty, the same profession, the same something like just getting by but with health insurance.

My mom has been commenting to me about the proliferation of political fundraising in her email in box.  She notes the personal-sounding pleas from Nancy and Harry, Obama, Joe, Hilary, addressing her by name, telling her "this is urgent."  Poor retired college professor and they are after her.  I open my eyes and peek at my iPhone first thing, obligingly checking email, to nothing but sales pitches.  Next, Google News, if not the weather icons, but full of similarly useless information, a selling of importance.  And note, sign of the times, or perhaps my own utter unimportance and lack of social utility, the lack of personal correspondence, the lack of the 'hey, how are you,' or anything remotely resembling a letter of old, or a postcard.  I'm guilty of falling into this culture as much as anyone.  It's as if all things were weighed for importance and relevance, maybe in the supposedly 'new' 'world' economy, and the personal came out the loser to the practical.  There's not much money to be made, there's not anything to sell or convince another of a need for a thing.  A quaint habit, squelched.  Just as people used to have real conversations when they picked up the old Ma Bell phone.

Perhaps it's not necessarily the case that, like any inhabitant of the electronic city, guarded against strangers, focussed on our own business, the motives of any personal missive is a primary consideration.  What does this person want from me, we ask.  Wired into, as emails now are, unless you have a really disciplined junk filter, are economic terms:  what is the worth?  a sale?  if too friendly, well, either the fool is dangerous, a crazy, for giving things away, or there is an ulterior motive.

When will we reach the point of making like a diminished tribe a last stand of the personal, for the offer of friendship and camaraderie in the cyber world?  Is such an erosion visible to those who offer personal interaction, as one might being a bartender to a place that allows time for a break, a place to come with regularity and familiarity?  I notice different walks of life accept it.  A noble talk that delves into literature, a bow to culture and travels discussed, a meeting place, a clearinghouse….

I find myself watching religious programming, the Catholic channel, EWTN, to get a break from the commercialization, the materialism, the emphasis on things, the broadcast culture of 'practicality,' economy, the death of attributing worth to human life.  Where does my own professional life of professional personal interaction lead?  When does it turn simply into a lack of funds, a lack of position, a lack of a decent regular life, a lack of tenure, a position untenable?  All for the lack of selling, as we all must, a product…

Must even academics be selling something, a product offered, to allow them the haven of their positions?  Sometimes the selling of anger through poetry or theater… Anger sells.

The words of an old Amherst English professor have a truth, that a teacher must battle against the world.

But as a writer, which is to say, still a human creature with some native wild about himself, I might take notice that the world, through its devices, tries to venture in, to intrude, to attempt to plant seeds of need or outside thought, as one tries to assemble the words that swim and bob in the rivers of his thoughts, really as if many different voices were trying to knock his tray over, to disrupt the thought and tasks at hand, the hands of a needy world of selfish individuals waving him over with their claims.  All of which I say in regard to media and commerce, to the world of advertising, the multifarious nature of just about everything you might look at, the ad next to the news story.

Say what you will about Hemingway or any other writer, but that wisely and humanely, they knew the validity of retreating quietly into silent work.

In the waning light of sunset of a warm January day out on the back porch, I see the rippled quality to the air the light is passing through above the shadow of my body, heat waves rising like billowing gasses pouring out, not unlike the sun does.  A plain observation I might not have otherwise noticed if I'd fallen into the rabbit hole offered by a laptop's web browser.

And I think of Emily Dickinson's work.  Her little blurbs of observations, often containing almost impossibly great power, unselfish, not selling anything, the confession of finding something to share captured in a metaphor or in the sound of the human voice itself…  The original messages that come out of one's own tended gardened brain connecting the day to day so that the next day coming toward us will not be diminished.  Seemingly unimportant little scraps, sketched out originally on odd bits of paper and envelopes before being gathered in to fascicle…

She spanned the Universe eventually without even leaving the confines of her yard and house.  She knew the bird-like creativity we might have with words from little ditties to sing to great epiphanies and gospels.



The first Sunday off I can remember in ages, working Saturday night in exchange.  I'd forgotten what feeling of normalcy a Sunday off brings.  One stops to appreciate the peace of the world, goes out to buy something to cook at home.  It makes me wonder, all the gullible fool kid making his first professional choices put up with to be part of a team.  You can only have one boss, it is wisely said.

How radically different it is to be off on a Sunday, everyone's day of rest.  Not that 'axe murderer feeling' of walking up through the park but different from all the rest, no time to smell the roses.  Not that large gap that must be bridged when talking to others, feeling the low-down shitttyness of Monday mornings.

How to put it without sounding blasphemous, the pattern of Christian life, the discovery of one's own earthly fit into it, the commensurate self-recognition that could only come from such a comparison.  Who would want to say that out loud?  It would be far better to be a religious academic or a defined member of church and clergy, or simply a church goer on Sunday than to observe that even outside of any defined tradition one's own life humbly and with human defect and sin and flaw was in some way a reflection of the pattern of Christ.

He was the anointed Son of God.  He performed miracles, knew His scripture inside and out, and people listened to Him.  It was somehow obvious who He was.

More and more I find myself reading about traditional support of the Bible's revelation.  The Union Theological Seminary that Bonhoeffer encountered struck him as mired in theological schism, disregarding the basis of the Christian story and meaning.  He got more out of the religious fervor and spirituals found up in Harlem.  To understand the history of Luther, the Dark Ages, papism, is to understand the importance of bringing forth the Bible itself to popular readership, the lessons therein largely self-evident, transforming, effective just through reading, no need of heavy handed guide.  To read Testaments Old or New is not an act we would ever need to be afraid of, because we have by dint of being human the intelligence and the spiritual receptors to understand and comprehend.

And so it seems possible that a spiritual life is attainable, with a bit of faith and effort and a good heart, without a great calling of attention to it, without acts of pride to distinguish the self as such.

If you are a scientist, you look for patterns.  You notice wave and muscle, the rings on a tree, the power of the sea.  Light itself, coming from the sun, has a pattern, a wave, like sound, perhaps like gravity, like time.  We too.

I come at this with the religious background of a child of the Sixties.  I learned good stuff, but was not raised in any church tradition.

But life is life, and we, who have ears and eyes, are able to learn.

Private matters feel embarrassing to share, but, here we are, human beings, and so, we give it a go.

As a reader, with a particular taste, with a particular digestive system, I found a basic need, for that I will not call bread here, as bread does not work for me, but meat, as meat, protein, fish, the main substance, the main nourishment, is what works for me.  This takes a lot of admitting, a lot of acts of recognition in a bread culture, a sandwich culture, and I wish it were otherwise.

I found I needed the Gospels, I needed the Bible.  I found other kinds of literature leaving me with the feeling of watching a joke set-up that I already knew.  Yes, exceptions, but then, to me anyway they would count as great literature, like Chekhov's tales of losers, Dostoevsky's tales of outcastes finding a way.

I found there was a pattern in the Judeo-Christian story, as I read it as literature, a pattern that I could not escape from observing.  Perhaps it was like Einstein looking out the window when he was a clerk and seeing workmen on the roof, falling into a day dream exercise considering if they fell.  But, anyway, a pattern that can not be avoided.

It would be difficult to outline, but for the familiarity of the story, still mysterious as it applies to our condition.  Part of it was the coming forward of the exemplary human being in touch with divine nature of deep reality to be amongst the regular, the rank and file, the publicans, the drinkers, the sinners.  A strange detail, perhaps, and yet a great coincidence.  And why, in such a world as we live in, would our spiritual salvation come from someone not materialistic at all?  someone who would grant himself only a few basics, letting his words stand, calm about everything.  Would this personally or otherwise mean anything to me?  Would it make intuitive sense to me, or to you?  Well, yes it would.

The realization could have made me sad.  Why wasn't I a participant in all this?  Why had I not before found a church to belong to?  Why had I acted in ways that were a little excitable, not calm enough for such undertakings?  Why had I been confused and bad of certain habit?  Why had I been a skeptic?

I had endeavored, like many of younger generations, to be that vague and amorphous thing, a writer.  Why do young people think of that, I wonder sometimes.  What to write?  Who will read?  Who will listen?  And, more importantly, what does one have to say, even anyway?  The world does not seem to need another book of semi-autobiographical self-discovery coming of age, but that such as it is, a human habit to write words when thinking of what to do and where to go.  I might offer that the desire to write comes out of a spiritual need, perhaps unfulfilled in modern secular education, in the absence of the chapel's presence.  So such efforts can be misdirected, a portrait of a life without the substantive guidance of higher belief, of God and divine love even for sinners.  (Was Hemingway one of the stone masons of such?)

So we go through stages, through great periods of being misguided, even if, to our credit, basically we do the right thing, offering kindness, even, or should I say albeit, professionally, to neighbors and strangers.

But there is, finally, the gem, the meat, the basis of literature, of the story itself.  Indirectly, but still, it comes up, embarrassing as it might be.  Something to share.

Lincoln:  {in a whisper}  Kennedy, the truth is, you and I are scribes.  We're meant to interpret the law, apply it to issues, maintain the scriptures.  Sometimes read it.  That's the respectable part of our job.  But… we're still, or at least we want to be, something somewhat someone like Christ or someone like that.  We have to do that part too.

 And I know we all have to go through the spiritual story, that we have to fall, too, like Job or any of them I suppose, in order to really grasp it.  So I was lucky, knowingly, in that I got what sorrows I could out of the way.  And I'd find it didn't kill me, so…  Because I knew unto the world come offenses.   So by the time of the end of it, well, you know, same thing happened to you, you were not…  unready.  Unready, let's say.