Toast and other musings

Toast never showed up last night. I worried that maybe he was toast.

(Crickets.)

(Crickets.)

He is back this evening. Maybe he was trapped in another room last night.

I worked a shift in the restaurant of the B&B where I am staying today. It was fun, actually, and I had only minor flashbacks to the last real table-waiting job I had. It was at the Blue Water Grill in New York, and was such a nightmare experience, that I realized today I had completely blanked out on most of what made it so bad. The family of restaurants it is a part of has gotten lots of bad press about the way they treat their employees, so it is nice to know that it wasn’t just me.

But this was low key and casual, and I get to meet new, interesting people, so for that it seems worth it. The woman who trained me looked about 26. A weathered 26 – too much makeup, a bit drawn and bony – but young. When she mentioned her fourteen-year old son, I thought maybe I’d misheard her. Later I managed to find out that she was indeed thirty-seven, and had actually had two sons but the older one (seventeen) had died recently. I couldn’t bring myself to ask how. I really wasn’t sure what to say.

It made me think about the fact that at my age she’d had a ten-year-old and a seven-year-old. And presumably a husband and a house (I didn’t ask). And I thought about the things that at this age I consider my proudest accomplishments: traveling parts of Europe and the Middle East on my own; setting up house (metaphorically of course) in two major cities – and finding friends, work, and a community in both these places; really every directing project I do, though some more than others and especially the Shakespeare; even writing my little articles every month for the Hill newspaper, I’m proud of that.

And then I thought about the things that I feel I have not achieved that make thirty feel like a big looming deadline: I still have to search for work; I don’t have a secure artistic home; I haven’t mastered a language other than English; I still haven’t read any of the great Russian novels even though every year I vow to start; I’d like to do more freelance writing for larger venues; I want to see other parts of the world – haven’t been further than Prague in Eastern Europe and have never been to Latin or South America or to Asia; and I haven’t been to the opera since high school.

Some of these things are easier goals to meet than others.

And then I thought, does this woman long for similar things? (Warning: some of this may come across as somewhat condescending. It is not intended to be so.) Or is she happy? (Save for the tragic loss of a son, which of course would devastate anyone). I wondered if having high-falootin’ goals and visions of what life should be is a blessing or a curse. And I wondered why none of my proudest achievements or immediate goals involved settling down or having children. Should they?

And yet I am not a pedigreed high achiever. No ivy degree. I wouldn’t qualify for the wedding pages of the NY Times Sunday Styles. My bookshelf is full, but the books are not impressive tomes about history or philosophy or economic theory – they are all geared towards theater or else they are contemporary fiction, mostly by rather depressive jews and half jews. I have never written a book, I haven’t started a non-profit, I don’t own an apartment, I have no titles.

I feel a bit trapped in the middle. Sometimes I wish I had swung more clearly one way or the other.

In other news I started reading the Australian novel CLOUDSTREET. I am enjoying it very much.