Restaurant Gal

When you are one of seven children in a blended family, everyone is cast in a role repeatedly played out, despite all efforts to break free and re-create oneself. One sister, for example, was the clumsy one, something of which she was reminded every day, which resulted in continual mishaps that ranged from minor–a bruised knee, to major–a concussion when she fell down the basement stairs. Was she really that clumsy or merely a self-fulfilling prophecy thanks to being continually told she was a perpetual accident waiting to happen?

I was the one who lost jewelry, from the cheapest of plastic toy baubles to my first birthstone ring given to me by my stepfather for my eighth birthday. As the years went by, I was given other rings and pins and bracelets, most of which ended up missing just when my parents would ask why I wasn’t wearing one of said gifts. When I graduated from college, my stepfather told me he wanted to buy me a ring, but, given my history, thought a train ticket to travel across country was a better option. I thoroughly enjoyed the trip and was relieved not to bear the responsibility and inevitable blame for yet another jewel torn asunder from my keep.

Decades later, when my grandmother passed, I was given a gift that left me awestruck–the very old and very beautiful engagement ring worn by her mother, my great grandmother. The ring had been given to my great grandmother by her second husband, when he proposed to her just as the Great Depression had begun. He was a doctor; a patient in need of his care offered him the ring as payment for his extensive services. I am not sure if it was a straight barter, or if he paid a nominal price for it in addition to providing the care. I do know, however, that despite its obvious value beyond anything paid, it felt priceless to all involved and dated back to the 1800s.

“Wear it, enjoy it, love it as she wanted you to,” my aunt said when, during a brief break from the sad chore of cleaning out my grandmother’s home, she gave me the glittering, most beautiful ring I had ever known.

I briefly hesitated. Then I reminded myself that I had managed to not lose my own engagement ring for multiple decades. My wedding pearls also remained secure in their black velvet box, tucked safely away. Surely, I had outgrown my childhood “loser” moniker and graduated to being worthy of keeping this gift that I would ultimately pass along to RG Daughter when the time was absolutely right.

Right?

And for three years I did just that. I wore it everywhere, except at work. I kept it with me at all times when traveling, lest the house burn down or someone burglarize my apartment. When people whom I didn’t know well complimented it, I told them that it was a fake. “Amazing how real it looks,” they’d say. “Yep, amazing,” I would agree, and then change the subject.

Last weekend, after much planning and begging others to cover our shifts, my great guy and I managed to take two full days and nights off together for the first time in months. It was literally my first day off in 18 days and 22 shifts. We didn’t look back as we headed off the rock, booking the pups into Rouletta’s former canine “country club and spa” for two nights, and treating ourselves to an oceanfront luxury hotel in Fort Lauderdale.

As always, I packed my heirloom ring in a little jewelry pouch, along with two pairs of earrings. I zipped it into an inside pocket in my purse and left it there, untouched. When we returned home, I quickly unpacked everything, both of us in a hurry to work night shifts, and I forgot to remove the jewelry pouch from my purse. Two days later, in horror and self-chagrin, I remembered. I dug through my purse, and there it was, the mesh pouch safely zipped away as I had packed it.

Except that it wasn’t exactly as I had packed it. When I shook the contents into my palm, only the two pairs of earrings fell out. Okay, so the ring must still be in my purse, I thought. But it wasn’t, despite my pretty much ripping the lining out of the thing to make sure the nightmare unfolding wasn’t happening.

I dug through every corner and crevice of my suitcase, on the off chance the ring had somehow ended up there, which I knew was impossible. I removed all my cheap earrings and $20 rings and two-for- $30 bracelets from my jewelry box and ran my hands over and over the velvet lining.

Nothing. Nada. It was gone. Vanished.

My heart pounded and I felt certain of two things: that I could no longer breathe and that I was going to throw up. Not that ring. Not that ring. Please, please, please not that ring.

I could not admit this loss to a single person, I decided. Not to my daughter, not to my aunt, not to anyone. After work and after a midnight dinner and two glasses of wine, I told my great guy.

“I’ll call the hotel in the morning, and we’ll go through the car and suitcase and everything again,” he calmly said, because he didn’t know my history–nay, my very identity–as a hopeless, dumb-ass, habitual jewelry loser.

I plodded through the following day at work at the place where I work the most shifts. I poured drinks and made conversation, and all was fine until I remembered the ring–which I remembered about every 15 minutes.

Over the next two days, I went through my jewelry box multiple times. I searched the floorboards of my car. I shook my purse out over and over again. And still, the ring remained missing.

“The hotel security office is looking into it,” said my great guy on the third day. “But nothing has turned up yet. You are absolutely sure you packed it when we were leaving for Fort Lauderdale?”

Hell, I could have unknowingly vacuumed up the thing if the ring had never made it into my purse in the first place. And if it had, and somehow it had dropped out of my purse in the hotel room, well, aloha my coveted and so-very-special ring.

“Can I talk with you?” asked one of my favorite regulars the following day–day four of the ring loss. She is an always-smiling, energetic woman who will do anything for you and does everything for everyone else. She constantly matches those with an excess something–be it clothing, an apartment, or even a broken AC unit–with those in need who are down on their luck or have to move tomorrow or know they can fix anything.

“Sure,” I said. I was doing the final paperwork before I left for the day. “Give me one second.”

“Okay, I’ll meet you at one of the deck tables, where it’s quiet,” she said. Hmm. Odd.

“What’s up?” I asked her a few minutes later.

“You know how I used to take care of my friend, the older woman?” she asked, which I didn’t really remember, but it didn’t surprise me. “Well, when she died, she didn’t have much, but what she did have I am sorting through and giving away.”

Okay, I don’t need anything, I am sure, I thought, wondering where this conversation was really headed.

“She would have loved you had she been able to meet you, because you are so cool and funny. And you wear similar jewelry to hers, believe it or not,” my regular continued. “So, I want you to take these gifts from my friend. She would have wanted you to have them and would have loved seeing you wear them.”

In my hand she dropped a tiny silver pinky ring inlaid with sapphire chips, and a pair of of dangling, antique silver-mesh earrings. I was stunned.

“But I never knew her!” I exclaimed, almost embarrassed. “Surely she has other friends, children…” I stuttered, feeling awkward.

“No, no, she had no one. Please take them, for the good karma,” she insisted. “They need a little cleaning up, but aren’t they beautiful?”

Yes, indeed. Incredibly beautiful.

“Look what one of my customers gave me,” I showed my great guy later that evening.

“Nice,” he smiled.

“Yeah,” I sighed. The gift was wonderful, but it made the reality of my lost ring more poignant. “Okay, one more time I am going through everything in my jewelry box to look for that ring,” I told him. I placed the jewelry that had belonged to a woman I had never known carefully on the coffee table. I’d add them to the jewelry box contents after I’d searched it for the umpteenth time.

I brought out the silk-covered box that had also belonged to my great grandmother and balanced it on my lap. I put on my glasses, opened the lid, and decided to take out every single piece of jewelry one more time. I reached for one of the two pairs of earrings I had packed with my ring, earrings I had already moved around in the jewelry box multiple times during previous searches. But this time, as I carefully picked up the pair, there it was–where it had not been for all the days I had been looking for it–acting as a kind of clasp holding the pair together.

“Oh my God, I found it!” I cried. “It’s right here, right here!” I exclaimed. I was utterly shocked, amazed and surprised. I had looked at those earrings so many times over the past few days. How could I have missed the ring being attached to them?

I glanced over at the sapphire pinky ring and delicate silver earrings that had belonged to the woman I had never known. And I knew right then, with complete certainty, that the spirit of this woman whom I’d never known had somehow arranged for my heirloom ring to finally be placed in plain view for me to find.

“Wow, you must not have seen it mixed up with the other earrings,” said my great guy, clearly happy and relieved for me.

“But, I had held them, moved them…” I started, then decided to let it go. Sure, sure. I must have simply missed and overlooked the ring throughout all my frantic searches. Yep, that was it.

How do you thank someone you never met, who passed before you ever had a chance to know her? How do you tell her you will cherish her tiny ring and beautiful earrings; and how they are both of a style you love and will frequently wear? And every time you wear them, you hope she hears your thanks for helping a perfect stranger find what had surely been lost forever.

“Hi,” he said, way too awake and far too jovial for my morning crowd. “Let me introduce myself.”

My regulars grudgingly looked up and silently acknowledged his presence, then immediately turned back to their styrofoam cups of dark coffee.

“Can I get you something from the bar?” I asked.

“No, no. I’m here to introduce myself,” he repeated, smiling as he fumbled with his attache. “Here,” he said, handing me a postcard-sized something.

The brightly colored, glossy card felt awkward in my aching fingers, which are perpetually cramping from too many shifts during which they are formed into a bartender’s grip poised to pour yet another shot of spirits.

“That’s me!” he exclaimed, smiling as I tried to make sense of the picture and message emblazoned across the front of his card.

“Well, yes it is,” I said, pretending to read it while waiting for his pitch to hawk booze, nonalcoholic teas, colorful bev naps or just about anything else this one of three places I work would never purchase.

“I’m running for the mosquito board,” he said, now very serious.

One of my coffee drinkers looked up at this comment.

“And I was told that if I want to win this thing, I need to visit every single local bar in the Keys.” Oh, that smile. “Well, and other places too. You know, restaurants and all the rest.”

File this place that I love and hate–and for reasons unknown to me to which I remain ever loyal despite the horrendous lack of money I make and the cast of characters I never thought I would ever, ever know, much less really get to know–under “all the rest,” I thought. I may not know much anymore, but I do know that this one place qualifies as everything that defines the ultimate of Keys “local.”

“Wait, there’s an actual mosquito board that one has to be elected to?” I asked, kind of curious. My locals breathed a collective sigh of relief as I asked this. Now they didn’t have to engage with this guy; it was all me and all him. Their coffees, their thoughts, and their quiet morning time was safe for another few minutes.

“In this county, yes,” he said, that smile still everywhere on his face.

“So, okay. But why you?” I asked, harking to my D.C. days, when I cared enough to vote in every single local election, based solely upon carefully thought-out reasons based on who-the-hell-knows what, now that I really think about it.

“Because I own a resort down south and the mosquitoes used to be under control and now they aren’t.”

Fair enough.

“It’s affecting my guests. My livelihood.”

I guess so.

“So I’m running for the board.”

My locals pretended to be disinterested. But I knew they were listening to every single word my mosquito man and I exchanged.

“You know what?” I said more than asked. “You have absolutely got my vote.” My God, any guy that drives more than an hour north to campaign for election to the county mosquito board deserves to be elected.

“Thank you!” he smiled more broadly than before. “Here!” he said as he handed me a pen.

Wait, a pen? With his name on it? A pen that actually writes? Ask any server or bartender. We covet pens. Give me a pen and I am your best friend. Give me two pens and I will give you a drink. Give me a handful of pens and I will not only vote for you, but I will tell everyone who walks through this local door as well as the doors of my other jobs to vote for you. Hell, I’ll be your campaign manager. No, seriously, you just met your vote-getting mama. Do you have a few more, pens that is?

“Just remember me on voting day!” he said, smiling that same ear-to-ear grin, as he walked out after dropping more pens on the bar.

“Are any of you registered to vote?” I asked my coffee-clatch gang, figuring I had a 50-50 shot at an affirmative answer.

“Does ten years ago count?” asked one.

“I never vote,” said another.

“What’s the point?” echoed his pal.

“Yeah, well I am registered,” I said. “And God help me that I am because I have to continually beg to get out of jury duty because I can’t afford the time off to serve, and I am on my third deferral as we speak.” I was rambling. “Anyway, if you can vote, vote for this guy.”

Blank stares from my regulars.

“Think about it. This is the mosquito board. That guy just drove an hour or more north to introduce himself and plead his worthiness as a mosquito board candidate right here, in this place!”

More blank stares.

“Well, all I can say is that he has my vote. And he better have yours!”

I was clearing my coffee bar.

“No, really!”

And they were going, going, gone.

So be it. I saved my candidate’s cards, however, and I have told anyone and everyone at my three jobs to vote for him.

On the eve of a tropical storm, the reaction to which screams first-snowfall panic in D.C., and as I smoke a last smoke for the night and swat more mosquitoes on my deck than I ever imagined would congregate around a citronella three-wick candle, I wish everyone in any kind of power could be more like my mosquito man: He drives miles to introduce himself; he has a personal connection to the problem he wants to correct; he really wants to get the job done.

I wish I had more of the guy’s cards. He needs a landslide, and I want to help make it happen. And no, it’s not about the pens. Okay, maybe it is, but only a little.

Anyone who knows me knows I am no cook. It’s not that I can’t cook–I can, and fairly well if I focus enough. It’s just that I’d rather do anything–including dishes–than cook. Oh sure, back in the day I cooked for the family (”Who wants breakfast for dinner?”), and once a year I hosted a holiday party for 50-70 people and cooked a veritable buffet feast that prompted many to say, “You must love to cook. This dinner is incredible!” Mr. RG and I always laughed at that comment, since he ultimately became the family chef, mostly out of self-preservation.

Then there is the Celiac Disorder issue, which makes cooking even more of a bore. Dining out is less of a bore, but far more risky and too expensive. Just when I think I know all I need to know to safely eat out, I find out that even fresh veggie sushi–without the soy sauce or any sauce, for that matter–makes my stomach ache and my chest and stomach break out in hives. Thank you, distilled vinegar. I might as well have eaten a donut.

After one particularly bad gluten attack from a mystery source, I noticed one of my hives didn’t go away. As days turned into weeks, this hive grew bigger and became a tad uncomfortable. Nice. When it got to the point that I stopped wearing any of my T-shirts except those with high enough neck lines that covered up the damn thing, I called one of the local dermatologists and begged for an appointment before work.

“We need to biopsy this,” said the doc.

“But it’s just an infected hive or something, right?” I asked for the second time.

“No, I don’t think it is. It’s not a melanoma, but I suspect it’s a skin cancer,” he said.

Sure enough, he was right, and I was wrong.

A week later I was back in his office, again feeling the sting of the numbing agent before he took the nasty thing off and singed the spot to kill it for good. As he scraped away (”It’s deeper than it first appeared.”), I re-lived the halcyon days of my thirteenth summer, when iodine-laced baby oil and album covers covered in foil were the norm for any of us girls trying to tan our skin darker than our friends’. This was followed by use of a Ban de Soleil product described as “orange gelee,” the smell of which immediately conjured up spending summers at the beach with those same friends as all of us tried in vain to keep the sand out of the greasy stuff.

The next morning, a little tender from the procedure, I was grateful to have at least the day off before I had to work a night shift. As I made coffee, I developed an incredible urge for fruit-filled muffins, which was immediately followed by a lesser urge for oatmeal-raison cookies.

I pulled out every bag of gluten-free baking products I had stashed in the kitchen, tossing out the ones that were out of date as I tried to piece together muffin and cookie recipes from the remaining product labels. I gave up, wandered to the living room and perused the long-ignored collection of cookbooks I had finally unpacked after several years and placed on the bottom of a bookshelf. I opted for Betty Crocker, substituted flour for flour, and cooked up a batch of mediocre raspberry-blackberry muffins. By then, the allure of adapting an oatmeal-raison cookie recipe–and actually trusting the gluten-free oats I had bought months ago to be gluten-free–had dissipated.

As I returned Betty to her dusty place on the bookshelf, I knocked over a small notebook-style collection of recipes I didn’t remember. Had I bought it at a yard sale? As it turned out, I had re-discovered my great grandmother’s dessert cookbook–a sparse collection of hand-written recipes categorized by those from whom she’d copied them–Mrs. McNeil, Mrs. Williams, and now and then a first name such as Marion. They were simply a collection of ingredients and minimal instruction about how to mix them. Not one included an oven temperature.

I spent an hour reading through each recipe, wishing I had looked here first and tried making a batch of Beulah’s carrot pudding or adapting ingredients for Mrs. Chapman’s Whipped Cream Cake.

It’s a cinch those ladies made a point to stay out of the sun in order to keep their skin fashionably pale and pretty and smooth, even as they aged. They cooked and swapped recipes, wore white gloves to luncheons and always kept a hat on outside. My great grandmother was a beauty right up until she died at age 82.

She would be 122 if she were alive today. She would scold me for my lack of desire to cook and my sun-kissed skin. Then she would bake me a batch of Mrs. Franklin’s spiced cookies and tell me to work less, cook more, and not worry about a skin cancer that is the easiest type to treat. Aging, she would tell me, is inevitable as much as it is fraught with the inevitable.

Be grateful. Be thankful. Take a baking day, now and then.

He was small, but tough. Very tough. And very small.

When they needed someone to crawl through unimaginably tight spaces and fix, find or forage for what might keep them all alive another hour, he was their man.

He was small and tough and very intelligent. He spoke with authority, certainty and complexity. He didn’t have to tell you he was right. He always was.

I never knew this brave, tough, smart-as-hell soldier who fought in a gritty war that occurred a generation ago. Others did, however, and I have gleaned from them sporadic, bright bits and pieces of his colorful past.

The man I know is small and sweet and never remembers my name. He re-introduces himself to me every 30 minutes on a bad night, twice a shift on a good night. Most nights he sits quietly beside his wife, drinking his beer and enjoying a plate of shrimp or chicken or whatever the night’s special is.

Now and then, this small, sweet man wanders off, which, in turn, sets off a flurry of mild panic as his wife and friends check the bathrooms and search the outside deck and parking lot. They always find him, however, and bring him back inside.

He mostly calls me “Princess” because he remembers that moniker, and he offers to get ice when I need it and take out the trash when the night is ending. At first, I refused his offers to help, but his wife begged me to allow him to perform a few chores each night, “Because it makes him feel useful.” So now I do. And he always does, with a smile.

Once when I brought the dogs in to say hello, he snuck a couple of fries and shrimp to each. “No!” cried his wife as she realized what he was up to. “Don’t feed that to those dogs, it’ll make them sick.”

I dug in my purse and pulled out an ancient bag of treats. “Here, you can feed them these,” I told him. His wife mouthed a silent “thank you.”

As I drove to work yesterday, I saw him walking along the side of the road. “Uh oh,” I thought, slowing down. Should I stop and pick him up? Did anyone know he was out on his own?

At that moment, I watched him stop beside a tree and pull down a branch filled with white blossoms. He held the flowery cluster to his face and breathed deeply. Then he smiled.

Seconds later, his wife walked out the front door of a nearby house and called to him. He waved to her. All was okay. I sped up and continued on my way.

What would it feel like to live every day when every day is timeless? I wondered as I faced the first of what is a long stint of 27 shifts over the next 21 days. What would it feel like to have all the time in the world to take as much time as you want to enjoy a simple flower?

In his case, he has earned this time. As for me, time eventually will tell.

“You look so familiar,” he said to RG Daughter as she poured his drink.

“Really? I grew up here, and I live and work here now that I’m out of school,” RG Daughter said, well into the second hour of a freelance bartending shift.

“No, no. Not here. Did you ever live in the Keys? Recently?” he asked.

“Uh, no but, um…” RG Daughter hesitated a second. “I mean, well, my mom lives in the Keys.”

“She does?” he asked, smiling now. “Does she work in a small bar in the upper Keys?”

“She works in three bars, but yes, one of them is up north,” RG Daughter said, knowing and not quite believing where this random conversation was headed.

“I met her! She served me a couple of drafts when I was down there fishing last month!” he exclaimed, not quite believing he had made this random connection.

“Seriously?” RG Daughter asked, laughing to herself when he confirmed the name of the bar located some 1000 miles from the bar she was tending. Seriously?

“Yes! There was something about the way you…I don’t know, poured my drink. I knew I knew you, but I guess it was your mom. Small world, right?”

“Yeah! That’s crazy,” RG Daughter said.

“Well, nice to meet you,” he laughed.

“You too,” RG Daughter laughed back.

Wow.

Add a third place of employment to your daily life, and you soon find that you live in an multi-layered netherworld of “almost” realities–almost feel like I live here; almost wish I could work more shifts there; almost wonder how the more things change, the more things remain the same everywhere.

A very short list of plusses and minuses about my tri-dimensional world:

Plus: Making money, finally.

Minus: Sometimes I forget where I am working, and I draw a total blank when I answer the workplace phone.

***

Plus: A bad shift at one place is often replaced by a good shift at one of the other places later that day.

Minus: It’s a double; it’s grueling.

***

Plus: No more sitting around the house and watching TV with the dogs during my time off, while my great guy works another in a perpetual string of shifts that occur opposite of mine.

Minus: Wait, did I feed the dogs–yesterday?

***

Plus: I appreciate my nicest customers at each job, allowing them to dilute the pain-in-the-ass customers that are a part of every job.

Minus: By the last hour of the second half of a double, no one seems nice.

***

Plus: I work for some great managers.

Minus: Balancing the moods and quirks and expectations of multiple managers, while trying to remember what rule is in what place at what job, can be tricky.

***

Plus: Making money, finally.

Minus that’s really a plus: Work, work, work and no time for a personal life that, of late, has had its challenges. This gives me time to ponder what’s next after I’m done making all this money, finally.

I have taken a third job, which means I now work eight shifts, with two as doubles.

I am not complaining at all. I am grateful to be working and finally paying my bills with a little left over.

I have many stories in mind, however. Soon, I know, I will eek out the time to write them.

In the meantime, peruse the archives and enjoy stories from the past four-and-a-half years.

Yours truly, living that dream,

RG

“I’m gonna smack the first person who says it’s too hot when August rolls around,” said one of my regulars during the first week of March, when we shivered again in the seemingly never-ending below-normal temps.

“Damn, it’s too hot for June,” he said two days ago.

So it is that we feel cheated again by the fair-weather gods in this quiet corner of paradise:

2010 Winter: 40s and more 40s.

2010 Barely Summer: 85 degrees and a heat index by 8 a.m.

2010 Winter: Felling cheated out of the perfect weather we usually enjoy.

2010 Barely Summer: Knowing we are still being cheated out of the perfect weather we never got to enjoy.

2010 Winter: Cranking up AC to 87 in hopes that blowing tepid air takes the edge off icy temps in house.

2010 Barley Summer: Feeling guilty about turning down AC to 75 at night, when utilities are included in rent.

2010 Winter: Rouletta won’t lie down on the cold tile floor.

2010 Barely Summer: Rouletta won’t move from the cold tile floor after a 5-second walk outside.

2010 Winter: Ordering a space heater online because the entire Keys is sold out of the things for weeks.

2010 Barely Summer: Buying battery- and crank-operated TV, radio, lanterns, etc., while still on the shelves, because if it’s this hot this early in the summer, what will the storm season bring?

2010 Winter: Tourists cancel vacations in droves because of snow storms up north and “winter” down south.

2010 Barely Summer: Tourists talk of canceling vacations because of oil-spill worries, visit the Keys anyway, then complain about the excessive heat.

2010 Winter: Layers and more layers that are never enough.

2010 Barely Summer: You want me to wear THAT and THAT and then work outside in the sun for seven hours?

2010 Winter: Locals lose their suntans because it’s too cold to go to a pool on a day off.

2010 Barely Summer: Locals lose their suntans because it’s too hot to go to a pool on a day off.

2010 Winter:

2010 Barely Summer:

“You must live the most stress-free life down here!” commented a customer to the bartender at an outdoor spot, where my great guy and I had just met after our many multiples of work shifts for the week.

My great guy and I exchanged glances as we sipped our cocktails. The bartender saw us exchange the glances and, in turn, glanced at us.

“I can’t even imagine it,” said the customer, now wistfully speaking more to himself about the Keys life he imagined he could live far away from his reality’s rush hours.

The archetypal dream to live where one vacations cajoles as it lulls, torments as it taunts, and sometimes–if the timing is just right in one’s life–captivates as it convinces.

Flip-flops replace dress shoes, shorts replace slacks, fishing themes emblazoned across T-shirts replace striped collared shirts. On the rare occasion when “dressing up” is encouraged–say, at a wedding–you can still wear the flip flops as long as you toss your tropical-motifed linen shirt in the dryer for a few minutes to make sure it’s relatively wrinkle-free after living in the back of your closet for months on end.

Trays and tables replace anonymous cubicles, bottles and blenders replace coveted corner offices, ready cash replaces dwindling credit as you slowly but very surely unwind from what and where you used to be.

Without exactly knowing how, you will quietly be absorbed into the local realm, although you will never be considered a local. You will be okay with that, however, because after a few months of living your new stress-free life, you will pounce on perfect strangers visiting from your former city or work life and eagerly share what you have in common as you beg them for news from your shared former reality. These strangers will, at first, be equally eager to chat with you, until you spend that one minute too many with them and they smile and ask if you could check on their order, “When you have a second.”

You will marvel at your quirky new co-workers as you let go of concerns about your future and simply live for the next day. One day, however, when several of these quirky co-workers come to work an hour late if they show at all, hammered or high or both, and you have to cover for them for the third time in as many days, you will marvel less and fume just a little. Because you notice that despite their proclivity for enhancing their stress-free lives, they will still get the prime sections and schedules, and you won’t.

You will, however, eventually discover that you live and work amongst some very hard-working co-workers and managers and others who embrace their stress-free lives as you do, but still maintain a modicum of a decent work ethic. You will befriend these people and they will become the circle in which you play and laugh and share the highs and lows of your stress-free life.

Until the day that one or several of these persons disappoints by allowing loyalty to ever so subtly seep away with the tides. You will then reach out to your closest friends from your former life and beg for their analyses of your stress-free reality, because you continually can’t decipher what is acceptable and understandable behavior on the part of your new friends here in this stress-free reality, where all the rules are fluid and mostly upside down.

One day, as you don your flip flops to walk to the bank to make a cash deposit to cover an overdraft and catch up on past-due bills, you will acknowledge to yourself that you and you alone chose this stress-free life in one of the most beautiful places on the planet, where the weather is sultry and soothing and the water is a brilliant blue-green.

You will acknowledge that human beings are human everywhere, in all their goodness and with all their failings. That work is still work, and that the rent must still be paid, even in slow season.

You will not immediately run from this stress-free life, as you have in the past. You will simply accept it for what it is, for all that it is, for right now. You will be surprised by nothing, and you will learn to expect just about anything. You will be smarter and savvier as you realize nothing too grievous has been committed here in your stress-free life. That all is okay, just not as perfect as one would hope a new stress-free life should be.

It’s real life when you live where you once vacationed. Ah, if only we could just live on vacation, instead.

It was his 75th birthday. His 75th birthday dinner date had cancelled on him three weeks ago. My great guy and I finally had one full day off together on his 75th birthday. We had an opportunity to go fishing on our one day off together on his 75th birthday.

“Is there a birthday boy in the house?” I asked, cake in hand, squinting as my eyes adjusted from the bright sunlight to the darkness of the local bar in which I’d never stepped foot.

He waved from one side of the bar, where he sat alone.

For the next two and a half hours, we sat, playing bar bingo and buying him drinks. We sang “Happy Birthday” to him. We cut the cake and served it to the handful of other patrons.

We’d go fishing together on another day.

***

I offered to work a double because I needed money. The second half of the double was a fundraiser for a local who needed help with medical bills.

“Buy a raffle ticket?”

“Have you signed up for anything in the silent auction?”

“How about a T-shirt for $10?”

I couldn’t mix a drink or pour a beer without one of the hundreds of people in attendance asking me for money. Every time they asked, I fretted about how much I could part with. I didn’t want to part with any of it because I wanted to make rent and my car payment next week, and pay the three overdue student loans I had ignored for 10 days.

“Here, this is for you,” he said as I handed him two drinks and he handed me two dollars.

“Thanks!” I said, folding the two bills and shoving them in my pocket instead of my tip jar at the other end of the bar, because five other people behind him needed drinks.

An hour later, as the fundraiser was winding down, I remembered the tip in my pocket. As I unfolded the bills, I noticed one was a $1 bill and the other was a $50. A gift or a mistake? Mine to keep or his to have back, if I could even find him again?

The fundraiser organizer approached the bar at that moment, asking for a glass of ice water.

“Here,” I said, giving her the $50. “For the cause.”

I think the money will ultimately get to the right person.

***

Recent, random days of seemingly mundane choices. On many such days, I am sure I ignore many opportunities to do right–not because I don’t want to, but because I feel that I simply cannot.

I’m hoping this past weekend allowed me to put some money back in my conscience account.