I unwound the constitute elements of my winter attire; scarf, coat, and gloves before donning the universal elements of my bartending uniform; tie, shirt and apron.  The extra five minutes of dressing and undressing was well worth the dryness of that crisp, clean, uniform.

One cup of coffee and a counted cash register bank later I stood behind the bar. When it rains around here the bars seem to gain a little extra atmosphere, damp clothes have a way of doing that. Put a lot of damp clothed people in a smallish room and, well, you probably get the picture.

I didn’t have much time to think about it because very quickly I was very busy. Damp clothed people apparently can be very thirsty. Half a dozen or so manhattans, two hot buttered rums, seven assorted red wines and a hot toddy later, and I had run the gamut of rainy weather drinks.

After making change for one woman I turned to face another woman standing in the area between brass rails that is usually reserved for cocktail service but is often utilized for a variety of other services such as change requests,Togoorders and the like.

I prepared for just such a request.

“Go to my car and get my bag,” said the lady holding out her keys.

“Beg your pardon?” I said while finishing up the two Scotch old fashioneds that I was already working on.

“Go to my car and get my bag,” she said again, adding a jiggling of her keys for emphasis.

“Uh, it’s pouring down rain,” I said not quite sure of exactly how to respond.

“I know,” she said. “I don’t want to get wet.”

I turned and took a drink order from two golf buddies before responding.

“Neither do I,” I said.

“I’m a customer here,” she said as if that in and of itself entitled her to whatever whim she fancied.

“I understand that, but I have a job to do here,”  I said making a circling motion with my hand surrounding the drinks that I was making. I also looked around the bar and surmised that a trip to the parking lot would probably take me at least 15 minutes including dressing and undressing time. Our bar was full, which meant that all of those customers would have to wait that extra 15 minutes before I could fulfill their needs. The needs that I was actually being paid to fill.

“I’m sorry, I said as politely as possible. “I don’t have time.”

She looked at me incredulously. “You’re a server,” she said. “You have to do what I say.”

Sometimes in the restaurant business people confuse the word server with the word servant. One is a person paid by an establishment to do a specific job; making drinks, serving food etc. The other is a person paid by someone to do what ever he or she wants them to do. The two words are not interchangeable.

Here are some things you can reasonably expect a server to do:

Tell you the specials.

Get you something to drink.

Take your food order.

Box up your leftover items.

Here are some things that servers often do as a courtesy:

Take pictures of you and your friends.

Sing you Happy Birthday.

Call you a taxicab.

Here are some things that a server probably won’t do for you*

Change your baby’s dirty diaper.

Warm up your car.

Loan you bridge toll, valet fees, or money for a cab.

Watch your kids while you go somewhere else for a drink.

Soon, I went back to doing what I was being paid to do and the lady headed over to the hostess stand. The hostess soon looked at her dumbfounded, and soon after that the manager mimicked that very same look.

About an hour later another lady approached our far less busy bar.

“Can you do me a favor?” she asked after waiting for me to conclude the transaction that I was already involved in.

“Sure,” I said.

“I don’t have an umbrella and it’s really raining. Is there anybody who could walk me to my car?”

I looked around at the much less crowded bar.

It was about 15 minutes before I returned, a little damp but no worse for wear and tear.

Sometimes, it’s when you ask for special consideration. And sometimes it’s how.

*All things that I’ve actually been asked to do while bartending.

I had done the easy part of my job, the delivery and construction parts and now came the harder part, the small talk. As we waited for the finale, a chocolate soufflé (ordered 15 minutes earlier), the ladies made my job that much easier, by engaging me in conversation.

“My son just graduated from law school,” said the wine drinker with the salt and pepper hair.

“He’s very smart,” said her companion in the chunky turquoise necklace.

So we discussed his smarts for a few minutes, as we did I reset their place settings and generally cleaned up their postprandial debris.

“He took the BAR recently and passed,” said salt and pepper as I took in cash from a departing server.

“Now he’s looking for a job, but it’s so hard out there,” said turquoise necklace.

I thought of all the applications that restaurants have been getting recently from out of work realtors, bond salespeople, and mortgage brokers. Not to mention the reams of applications from people who were once restaurant workers and are again reentering the business as a result of the current economy. It is certainly a whole different hiring world then it was just five years ago.

“He picks things up very quickly,” said salt and pepper.

“Yes, he’s very smart,” said turquoise necklace, again.

I was beginning to feel like I was being set up for something.

I delivered the steaming hot soufflé. As I broke open the top and poured in the chocolate sauce, it came as sure as I knew it would.

“Do you think he could get a job here?’ said salt and pepper.

“You know, as a bartender?”

“Does he have any experience?” I asked knowing full well that we were so heavily staffed that even the experienced bartenders that we already had were all looking for extra shifts. But then my job is to be conciliatory, not confrontational.

“No, but he went to law school,” she said with a decidedly condescending note.

“Well, maybe he should get a job as a lawyer,” I thought to myself.

What I actually said however was quite different.

“We tend to hire people with several years of experience,” I said politely as I refilled their coffee.

“It can’t be that hard,” she said in a far less friendly tone then she had started out with.

Well, so much for an enjoyable evening. Reality has a way of taking the fun out of things.

Recently a rival bar manager had stopped by to see me; we had worked together many years ago and remain good friends to this day.

“What is up with these people with no experience going into the busiest bar in town and asking for jobs?” she said after a shot of Don Julio.

“I only want to work weekend night,” she said mimicking one of them.

“Really?! Just the busiest nights of the week in the busiest bar in town? With no experience? Sure. Why not?” she continued waving her hands in the air. “We are all just a bunch of idiots anyhow,” she said sarcastically. Taking a sip of her tequila she added, “Idiots with jobs.”

Eventually as the night wound down and the last cuddly customers left, I joined her for a Don Julio myself. And together we came up with some simple things to consider if you are ungainfully employed and are looking for a “new revenue stream” i.e. a job in the bar business.

1) If you have no experience in the bar business, don’t go to the busiest place in town and ask for night shifts. Saying that you will work any shifts is much more likely to get you a job. As is applying at the slowest place in town. It just might work out better for you and for them. At the very least you can put down some experience for your next interview.

2) Demeaning the job you are applying for is a great way to have your resume end up in the wastebasket.

3) If it has been ten years since you last bar job take into consideration that nobody drinks the drinks that you remember. Eight hours of making hand muddled raspberry mojitos might make you reconsider things.

4) Also consider that in the small community of bars and bartenders many jobs are filled without applications or interviews, but by word of mouth, and existing friendships.

5) Don’t tell potential employers what you want from them. Putting down “I am willing to learn,” really means I want to be paid while you teach me a skill. Telling employers what you can do for them, even if it is not much, will be far better received. Remember it’s not all about you.

6) Good luck, because at the rate that restaurants are closing, you are going to competing for jobs with people who have been in the bar business for the past ten years.

http://gevmag.com/2013/04/28/shake-it-up/

Howie was an interesting fellow, and as interesting fellows go, offered interesting conversation. He was a dying breed, the philosopher/craftsman, a man equally adept at quoting Lao Tzu as he was building the most impressively artistic garden gate you’ve ever seen. Dos Equis’ “the most interesting man in the world” is but a thin fictional caricature of the real man Howie was.

“I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold and very well-made,” James Bond said in “Casino Royale,” the original Bond book. Howie didn’t say things like that; he lived them. He didn’t drink much, nor often, but when he did it was always a treat. The conversation could go from women to Hemingway to ’68 Pontiacs, back to women, before heading off into existential thought. I always felt richer after a night with Howie.

One day a mutual friend came to see me, a man just as interesting in his own right. Often I use this space to comically characterize the downside of the restaurant business, but the enormous upside is all the interesting people you get to meet. He told me Howie was sick, a brain tumor, inoperable and terminal. I was shocked.

The next time Howie came to see me, his large, well-made and very cold cocktail was on the house. Howie, never at a loss for words, told me the whole story, from his collapse in a shopping center up to his present diagnosis.

“I am not losing hope,” he said. “I am going to explore some alternatives.”

I cried, certainly not then and there, but later during my late-night ride home.

I helped him with some information I had about alternative therapies. Like I said, you do meet a lot of people in this industry.

He did some other things on his own, things that perhaps only a carpenter with a working knowledge of Hermann Hesse’s “Siddhartha” might undertake. He also went to his regular doctor. Howie was a lot of things, but he was no idealistic fool.

A few months later he came in late as he had so often done before. We didn’t talk about his illness. We spoke of his love for artisans. Howie certainly loved things well made and he had a great appreciation for beauty, be it four-wheeled, two-legged or one-cubed.

And he always made me laugh. After the stories and the laughter I asked the inevitable.

“What’s up with your health?”

“You are never going to believe this, Jeff. But it has completely regressed. I went to the doctor the other day and he said the tumor was completely gone.”

A modern-day miracle, I thought. And it was sitting right there in front of me. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

“All change is a miracle to contemplate, but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant,” said that darn Thoreau. Sometimes smart people are just annoying.

Howie attacked his reprieve with a zest for life rarely seen. Like a man possessed he skied every weekend that winter. He came in more often than before. He took big draughts of all that life had to give.

One night he came in just as I was going on break.

“My expectation was to see you, dude” he said, in that odd mix of education and vernacular so peculiar to philosopher/craftsmen.

“Dude, we always have next time,” I said echoing same.

I didn’t see Howie the next week, nor the week after.

A month later our mutual friend visited.

“I guess you heard about Howie,” he said.

“Sure, it’s a freakin’ miracle.”

“What are you talking about?” he said looking at me oddly.

“What are you?”

“Howie died last week.”

“He was cured,” I said barely getting the words out.

Our friend merely shook his head. No.

To this day I don’t know if Howie really believed he was cured, or if he just didn’t want anyone’s pity. I do know that if I had to do it all over again, I really wish I had never taken that stupid break. Every darn day.

“To regret deeply is to live afresh,” is something else Thoreau said.

I don’t think I believe him anymore.

So it begins, another Easter brunch shift.

I throw the offending drink out and start again; raw egg white, cream, sugar, gin, a splash of lemon before a dry shake. Then an orange flower water rinse of the glass, a shake with ice, a strain and a topper of fresh nutmeg, just like all the books say. Perfect.

“He says this one doesn’t taste right either,” the waiter says before he wheels off again.

I try a little more sugar. It comes back again. I try a little orange juice — just to be different — it comes back again. I try a little more gin. There are only so many ways I can make this thing.

“He must have liked the last one,” I mention as the waiter passes, noting an absent return.

“No, he just remembered he doesn’t like gin.”

“Then why did he order a gin drink?” I ask, but the waiter is already gone.

Sometimes in the restaurant business, there are no answers, only questions.

Today is Easter, the original moveable feast, if you don’t count Triodion or Shrove Monday, and I don’t. The date for Easter, unlike Christmas, moves around. The reasons are long and complicated. The name, on the other hand, is easy. The name Easter is based on Eoster, a spring celebration for the ever-hopeful goddess of the dawn, Eos.

Hope does spring eternal, if you believe Alexander Pope, and I do. Hope is what keeps people in the restaurant business going. We hope all goes well; we hope we get decent customers; we hope the food is hot and the drinks are cold, and along the way we do what we can to make sure that all of that happens. However, busy holidays get in the way of that.

Easter is one of those days where people who don’t normally go out, do. I suspect the same might be true for some of the religious services, too, but I can only comment on their aftermath. In my 31 years in the restaurant business I have worked at least 20 Easters, and even though the years were different (and the dates, moveable feast and all that), I have seen a lot of similarities. All the hope in the world won’t stop some of these things from happening:

• Restaurants will overbook. They have the opportunity to make a lot of money from people that they are only going to see once, and they are going for it.

• A waiter or waitress will cry.

• After two mimosas, a grandma will say something really inappropriate.

• Also after two mimosas, her family will pretend they didn’t hear it.

• A father and a son will fight as will a mother and a daughter. They might even be in the same family.

• Some eggs will be undercooked and a piece of bacon will find its way into an omelet ordered by a vegetarian.

• Veteran food servers will keep it together and rookie bartenders will fall apart.

• Someone will say Bloody Mary, when he or she really means mimosa. The resulting misunderstanding will cost a waiter his tip.

Such is Easter in the restaurant business.

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places,” said Ernest Hemingway, whose posthumous Parisian memoirs were published, ironically, as “A Moveable Feast” — which, of course, had nothing to do with Easter.

Here are some other Easter ironies you might not know:

• The original Last Supper, a Passover seder preceded the original Easter Sunday by four days. However, because of discrepancies among the Julian, Gregorian and Hebrew calendars, they rarely line up any more.

• Because of calendar discrepancies Orthodox Easter is celebrated on May 5 this year, which I believe is the date of another popular Mexican-American restaurant festival.

• The original word for Easter, Pasch, also means Passover.

• Communion wafers are still made of unleavened bread because of Easter’s association with Passover.

So, forgive me if any of this causes any of you distress. Easter is about forgiveness after all. But remember this one steadfast Easter truth: I’ll still be making Ramos fizzes today, like I’ve done more than 20 times. And for better or for worse, they always have gin in them.

Some online comments attribute the problem to a sense of entitlement many believe has begun to permeate this county, which reminded me of something that happened many, many years ago.

It was a fine dining restaurant decked out with the best leather booths money could buy. Certainly, it was the hottest place around. All the foodies were tittering, and all the must-be-seens were there. Every other week there was an article in a magazine or newspaper about the place. I was lucky to have been hired there and was just beginning to learn the ropes.

One night there was a reservation for the guitarist-singer of a band that had its heyday in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Some of the staff were fans, and some were not.

Mr. Rock Star arrived late for his reservation, so late that at least two other parties were waiting because of the backlog. Restaurant reservations are not guarantees, they are best guesses based on the behavior of others, which unfortunately can make them prone to quite a bit of error.

The line, “overfed, long-haired leaping gnome,” by Eric Burdon in his song with War, “Spill the Wine,” popped into my head when Mr. Rock Star arrived. Also arriving was an acrid smell that one becomes familiar with when one has hippish parents and has lived through more than a few Summers of Love. Mr. Rock Star’s scent, dirty T-shirt and matted hair must have passed the dress code muster because the maître’d sat him. Amazing how the rules go out the window when celebrity is involved.

Eventually a drink order came through for two double Martell cognacs, the best hooch in the house and $160 for two drinks. And this was long before the housing-Internet-stock market bubble even began to inflate; $160 for two drinks seems extreme now, but back then it was obscene.

The two drinks sat in the service window cooling off. They had been ordered “heated,” which any aficionado will tell you destroys the subtleties of cognac; the glass is shaped the way it is so your hand’s heat warms the glass. Heating it with hot water is a novice’s mistake. Not that I was going to mention it. The customer gets what the customer wants, so in the interest of facilitating that endeavor I picked up the two cognacs and carried them over to the table before they cooled off.

I set down the drinks and noticed that Mr. Rock Star wasn’t wearing shoes. Furthermore, it looked as if he hadn’t been wearing shoes for quite some time. And now, his dirty feet were resting on our leather booths, the supplest money could buy. I mentioned it to the maître’d.

“What am I supposed to do? Ask him to leave?”

This, of course, never happened. Instead, two more double cognacs later and the two men left on their own. After holding up reservations for more than an hour, they only spent half an hour in the restaurant. Half an hour, four drinks and $320 later and I had a better understanding of what entitlement meant.

This leaves me with these thoughts:

• Mr. Weir probably wouldn’t last one minute in this county as a restaurant employee.

• The old joke: “Why does the psychologist have a bass player solo at his office?” “To get people talking,” might need to have its instrument modified.

• If you open a place of business, staff it with your employees and then play there with your band, aren’t the people hanging out there actually “your” people? Just asking.

• Leprechauns (a type of leaping gnome) have a fascination with making shoes, just FYI.

• Entitlement is not new in this area; it goes all the way back to the 1960s.

• Oh yeah, happy St. Patrick’s Day!

For the two couples seated at the bar, it meant short sleeves, short dresses and a short courtship. Kissing was already going on at the table, and I was doing my best not to notice. Not as easy as it sounds when you are standing three feet away but, as a consummate professional, I did my best.

Courtship comes in many flavors, some subtle and some gross. Let’s not forget that the word itself comes from the late Middle Ages, a time of knights and chivalry, when one “paid court to a lady.”

The romantic notions of that thought got lost in the sloppy sounds of wet kisses exchanged by one of the couples.

“Does anyone here know anything about cars?” announced a new arrival loudly to the entire bar. The couples looked her way briefly before retreating to their embraces.

“Can I get you something?” I said to the slightly discombobulated brunette.

She flung her large purse on the bar, knocking over the drink of a well-behaved solo guest seated outside the volume range of the amorous couples.

“Sorry,” she said dismissively, suggesting that she was anything but that.

The brunette then engaged in a loud conversation on her cellphone.

“I know I should have gotten it fixed last month, but I have a life, you know.”

She waved a hand at me insistently only to raise one finger on that hand as soon as I arrived, signaling me to wait.

I waited briefly while she continued her phone conversation, stating that her current predicament was not her fault. Perhaps in her world, engine warning lights mean “whenever you get around to it.”

Eventually, she waved away another guest who tried to sit next to her.

“I’m waiting for my date,” she said, covering the phone’s mouthpiece.

Said date dutifully arrived. A handshake indicated the blindness of the arrangement.

“My car is broken down outside,” the brunette said to her potential new beau.

“Do you have AAA?” he asked.

“No, do you?”

An awkward start to be sure, but an early spring and two kissing couples can do strange things to one’s logic.

“Do you still want to get dinner?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said. “We can deal with my car later.”

We?

Partway through their dinner, which was interrupted by repeated phone calls, the conversation became more of an interrogation.

“Do you know anything about cars?”

“Do you think you can look at it?”

“Can I leave it at your house?”

“Can I use your AAA?”

“No, no, no, yes,” he said, offering some help without judgment or condemnation.

She, of course, didn’t see it that way.

Her voice started to rise, which caused one of the kissing couples to move farther down before resuming their amorous activities.

“I’m having a crisis here,” the brunette announced loudly into her phone.

“No, I don’t have the money to get it fixed,” she said, more, it seemed, for her present company, than for the person on the other end of that call.

Eventually, her date signaled for the check.

“You’re just going to leave me here?” she asked in a tone wholly unsuited to a first date.

“No, I’m going to get your car towed to your house.”

“Then what?” she practically screamed.

“Then, you are on your own.”

That was not something she wanted to hear.

“I was hoping that you would be a man and take care of me.”

He simply shrugged, noting perhaps the paid-for dinner and the paid-for tow.

“I was looking for a knight in shining armor to come and rescue me,” she said, this time into her phone.

This exchange left me with these thoughts:

• All the armor in the world can’t protect you if the threat comes from the inside.

• The nights are getting shorter and so is patience.

• In order to be treated like a lady, one must first act like a lady.

• Transferring responsibility is often easier than taking it.

“What wines do you like?”

“I like them all.”

“How about the chardonnay?”

She wrinkled her nose.

“The viognier?”

Another wrinkled nose.

“The sauvignon blanc?”

Another wrinkle.

“The Albarino?”

Wrinkle, wrinkle.

“Well, that is all the white wines we have.”

“I don’t really like white wine,” she said finally.

Perhaps she should have mentioned that upfront. Time to attack this from a different angle.

“I like the syrah or the petite sirah, the zin and the cab,” I said, resorting to common shorthanded vernacular in order to speed things up.

Wrinkle, wrinkle, wrinkle.

“How about the merlot or the sangiovese?” I ventured, leaving only one wine on the list unmentioned.

She looked at the wine list for a second longer, and then selected the only wine on the entire list that I had not recommended.

I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

“You chose the only wine he didn’t mention,” said her friend, voicing the very thought bouncing around in my head.

“What does he know, he’s just a bartender,” she said, which made me wonder why she had asked in the first place.

“Questions are a burden to others; answers a prison for oneself,” according to the late ’60s British TV show “The Prisoner.”

I find that sentiment to be true because, sometimes, people ask questions but they’re not really interested in the answers. The question itself serves as a type of manipulation. It can be an interruption, like asking an inappropriate question at a crucial moment of a story, which only serves to derail the story itself. Or asking question after question with the sole purpose of disrupting the rhythm of the other person speaking. And, sometimes, people ask questions that are actually thinly concealed insults; “Does anyone else here know what they are talking about?” is a perfect example.

A few minutes later a waitress asked if I could recommend a wine to a table, a minute after that some regulars asked me to sign a copy of my book, and still later two liquor sales reps both handed me their business cards. All of which the nose-wrinkler and her friend watched with increasing interest.

“Hey Jeff,” an arriving couple said, “what’s drinking well tonight in reds?”

“If you like deep reds, go with the petite sirah,” I said. “If you are in the mood for something lighter, go with the regular syrah.”

“Aren’t they the same grape?”

“They are related. Petite sirah is also called Durif, and is a cross between peloursin and syrah that originally found its name in the Rhone Valley, when discovered by Francois Durif in 1880.”

Nose-wrinkler and her friend simply stared.

“Ninety percent of the wine labeled petite sirah in California is Durif. The rest is a combination of peloursin, syrah, grenache or mourvedre,” I said. “It wasn’t until 1997 that DNA testing confirmed those facts.”

I paused.

“Why do these people ask for your advice?” the nose-wrinkler asked.

I smiled, a thinly veiled insult. I now knew she wasn’t seeking any actual information.

“I dunno,” I shrugged.

“Hey Jeff …”

On and on it went. Any good bartender will get his or her name called many, many times on any given night. And any bartender (good or bad) will get asked questions. Lots of them. Sometimes, people will even listen to the answers.

“Who are you?” nose-wrinkler finally asked me after a particularly intricate description of the differences between two other wines.

“Me? I am just the bartender.”

All of which left me with a few thoughts:

• Nobody is “just” anything. We are all more than what we do for a living.

• Bruce Lee once said, “A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer,” and no one ever called Lee a fool. At least not to his face.

• Questions are sometimes not questions at all, but rather a set up to be dismissive. And being dismissive answers an awful lot of questions about the person asking the questions.

• Euripides said, “Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing,” which either made him a terrible bartender or a great customer. Or vice versa.

“Finally some adult time,” said my newest charge.

The person who had just vacated that seat had offered no chance for interaction, which was fine; people need what they need. But, this new person appeared to crave the opposite. Oh well, in the restaurant business you either learn how to adapt or you find another job.

People sometimes ask me, “Aren’t you tired of doing the same job for so long?” I just smile, because it is never the same job — ever. The people always change. Sometimes that’s the people you work with; sometimes it’s who you work for. But the biggest change is the customers — they change every day, all day.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus might have put it best when he said, “You can never step into the same river twice, because other waters are constantly flowing in.”

Anyone who works in the restaurant business will tell you the same thing. It’s never just another day, another dollar.

With that thought I scooped up the dollar bill left as a gratuity.

“Yay!” one of the other patrons farther down the bar yelled for no apparent reason.

“Woo hoo!” his companion yelled.

There is nothing that says adult like 50-year-old men wearing board shorts and shouting nonsense in a bar.

“I spend all day dealing with children,” my newest arrival said, seemingly oblivious to the commotion.

“I know what you mean,” I said before heading back down to the hollering men.

“Guys,” I said in a calmly reassuring tone. “I’m glad you’re having a good time, but perhaps you could bring it down a notch.”

They grumbled briefly before applying a new, lower notch.

“I am an elementary teacher,” my positively positioned person said.

I nodded.

“All day long I try and be positive, set boundaries …”

“Hey,” I said, directing my comments toward three 40-something women at a cocktail table. “I’m not going to tell you again. You can’t use the martini glasses to play quarters.”

I shook my head at them while raising my forefinger. “No!”

The women giggled conspiratorially, but put the quarter away.

“So like I was saying, all day long it’s staying positive, setting boundaries and providing alternative activities,” she continued.

“Hey!” I said looking past her to Mr. Boardshorts, who had just knocked over another glass. Changing my tactics, I handed him a towel. He looked at it for a moment before he realized it was for cleaning up the mess he had just made. Sheepishly, he wiped the bar.

“Here’s a menu, if you want to order something when you are done.”

At about this moment the boys spied the girls and vice versa. And soon enough in spite of their mortgages, marriages, kids and professions, they all started squealing like junior high kids.

“I was all … and she was like … and then they were all … ” said the middle-aged Realtor to her similarly aged friends.

“Dude, I’m gonna kick your a— if you don’t shut up,” said the mid-centurion lawyer laughingly to his companions who were also approaching the mid-century mark in age.

Eventually the two groups merged, with one part of the group making out in public and the other doing their best not to notice, all punctuated by an occasional high-pitched shriek.

Meanwhile, my teacher sat at the bar sipping her one adult beverage of the week.

“Thanks for the delightful evening,” she said, getting up to leave.

“Thanks for coming in,” I said, while simultaneously raising a finger at the giggling group making out in the back.

It’s just nice to finally have some adult interaction.

I looked around the bar at all the middle-aged adolescents, smiled and thought:

• Sometimes, the only thing necessary for adult interaction is an adult beverage.

• Heraclitus also said, “The path up and down are one and the same,” a thought that can be applied to age-appropriate behavior as well.

• Maybe there’s a future in elementary school teaching for bartenders. Or, perhaps, elementary school teachers have a future in bartending.

• Either way, the thoughts of one long dead Greek are going to come into play.