The Busboy

The first time he spoke to me was when he served the coffee at the end of the dinner. After placing the cup and pouring from the silver pot in his hand he said, “I forgot to bring the sugar and cream. After a pause he added shyly, “This my first day her and I don’t remember everything yet.”

Although I have difficulty remembering busboys and waitresses, I had noticed him because he walked as though he was not quite sure of his body and his face had an earnest but unanimated look.

I was sitting alone in the roof top luxury restaurant in a hotel in the Colorado Mountains awaiting the start of a Child Welfare League of America on children and youth. None of my friends had yet arrived and so I had no company for dinner. The inexpensive hotel coffee shop on the ground with its air of transience and filled with men and women eating quickly to get to their next appointment, was uninviting. Loneliness encourages me to extravagance, I found my way to the hotel’s luxury restaurant. Surrounded by elegance and pampered by an attentive staff. I had worked my way to the coffee.

“I don’t use sugar or cream,” I said, “so I don’t mind.” Because he still looked pained I said, “First days can be hard.”

“Yes, but I am trying,” he said. “I graduated from Vocational School

last year and I couldn’t get a job.”

“I’m glad you found one and I wish you the best of luck.”

On the way out I stopped at the reservation desk and asked to speak with the manager. Larry Mullins was his name and after mixing a salad to a table of four, he approached me.

After introducing myself, I said, “I just wanted to say something about your new busboy. I was impressed with how he wants to please people, not only me but I was watching him at other tables. You don’t find too many people like that anymore. I hope he make it.”

“You mean Daniel,” said Mullins. “It’s nice of you to mention it. He is mentally retarded but I mean to keep him. He been out of school a year and I told everyone here that I don’t care what happens, he is going to stay. I can make him learn.

I choked a little, told Mr. Mullins I was glad to hear that. We shook hands and I walked away feeling that this conference for children had already peaked for me.

More Later, Joe

Day Dreaming's Revenge

(Continued from July 8, 2009)

The art of day dreaming grows with practice. (I should have spent as much time on my violin). From childhood fantasies fed by envy, it was a natural progression to the satisfying fancies of revenge. At the reunion I noted the wrinkling of childhood and adolescent beauty. I gloated that I was one of the few who was still working at his music. (I had played in a community symphony orchestra for thirty-nine years). As for automobiles, I claimed superiority by virtue by my well-practiced and principled disavowal of conspicuous consumption.

Childishly malicious? If it's good enough for John Updike it's good enough for me. In his novel "Bech At Bay" the protagonist (Updike's alter-ego) gets revenge by killing the critics who had previously scorned him. (Never too late for me to find a new hero). Updike has only to put down his vengeful pen to return to reality. For the ordinary day dreamer there is always a wailing child who needs us, or bills to pay, or the lawn to mow. I could never day dream my way through those trials.

You can rest assured in your day dreams, Joe

The Rewards of Day Dreaming

(continued from July 7, 2009)

My talent for [daydreaming] appeared at an early age. To my mortification, I saw that many of my childhood contemporaries were clearly more handsome, more clever, more worldly than I. From first grade on they received more valentines from the prettiest girls. In eighth grade they won the music memory contest and in High School they were the first to obtain a driver's license. Clutching my few valentines, struggling to distinguish Mozart from Beethoven, gaping at a yellow convertible speeding out of the school parking lot, I honed the self-isolating art of reinventing myself. I day dreamed that I received a valentine with a heart drawn on it from the prettiest girl in the class; that I could differentiate Prokofiev from Mahler and that I was an adolescent sophisticate driving with one hand on the wheel and the other around a girl. Thus, the motives in attending my 50th high school reunion were not entirely pure.

More Later, Joe

Day Dreaming

(I should preface this post by stating that Day Dreaming was first published in a literary journal in Winter 1999.)

The ability to pass time gracefully is an art that makes idleness attractive. Recently I was housebound and largely immobilized for two weeks recovering from surgery for a bone spur. Happily, I was well prepared to endure the inactivity. While some may have chafed at the enforced leisure, I enjoyed these doldrums.

Good habits, we are told, are learned in childhood. So are bad habits, and thus it was that in childhood I learned the pleasures of passing time by doing nothing. To appreciate this skill, one must understand that idleness is as much a state of mind as it is an absence of activity. The essential requirement is a shameful surrender to nothingness. Day dreaming, with its misty, evanescent, self-hypnotic qualities fits that definition. Self-serving and self-indulgent, it is perfect comfort for one's privations.

More Later, Joe

Just Like Starting Over

My seventies were for summing up. I thought about the person I had become and what I meant to others. I thought about the after-life of fatherhood when the true pleasure of being a father is found in happiness for what the children have become, for what they have done and how they have grown in the doing.

In the nineties one must find new motivations for going on. The goals I had set for myself earlier had given me a destination. Goal setting is an art form, combining inspiration with self-expression. Art is said to mirror life. Well, a symphony ends with a flourish, a drama with an internal logic, a song climaxes on notes of beauty, a ballet ends with grace. The mirror must be rigged to break up in one's nineties. Then, as I tugged at this paradox, the solution came to me. Life is hugely interesting. As a man in passion allows himself to get involved with a woman, I, overcome with interest, understand that I want to live on.

More Later, Joe

Change and the Feminine Mystique

Change, we are told (correctly) is inevitable, and essential within our culture. No surprise then that even femininity has changed, for women have become more like men (I am simply observing, that's what writers do). Women today are more assertive, more competitive with men (often out-performing them); many women speak the coarse language that was once a male prerogative. Women are as frank about sex as men. Have you read Cosmopolitan Magazine the past decade? More women than men write about orgasms. Away, women have scored! Baking cookies and making jam as a stay-at-home mom is no longer the role model. Why? Blame or bless the Women's Rights Movement. Gaining victory in the work place -- women now out number men in some of the once traditional male occupations --augmented by the disciplined effort that scratched out a greater equality with men in managing the household; campaigning for and winning political office on a wide, and almost to the level of Presidential, scale; and workouts in the gym for vigorous muscle-building and martial arts exercise.

Change is rarely instantaneous. It is most often slow. It is the early women's rights marchers, in their seemingly sedate, long dresses who rebelliously took to the streets, that led the way to bigger demonstrations and more yelling, by contemporaries marching in shorts and sometimes foul-sloganed t-shirts, bringing women out of the anonymity and subjugation that marred the lives of many millions to do more than simply fill the shoes of men. Through the work they choose, votes they cast, leadership they provide, and children they still raise up, women have also fashioned new shoes to march in with pride.

Change is good but one thing will never change. Some people will always prefer vanilla, others chocolate.

More Later, Joe

(For those who may not know, the Feminine Mystique is the title of a book written by Betty Frieden in 1963 after a questionnaire she sent to her classmates from Smith College, class of '42, revealed a lack of fulfillment in the lives of women which was generally kept hidden. )

The Tyranny of Petty Things

In my day one wage earner could support a family; civility was the expectation; most people had a healthy touch of narcissism that made them want to look attractive. The bobby-soxer is now quaint but the girls in their plaid skirts, cardigan sweaters and saddle shoes were cute. Owning a securely financed home was the rule. T-shirts and sweatshirts were attire for the backyard. Schools taught well, educating the boys and girls who became the Greatest Generation. We never fully appreciate the good times, because for most of us the tyranny of petty things -- grocery shopping, going to the hardware store for a faucet washer, doing the laundry, mowing the lawn, taking the car in for the annual inspection, going to the bakery and the bank -- distract us. That’s why we have retrospect.

More Later,

Joe