Dear Feastlings,
Thirty-seven years ago or so, the sweetest calico cat showed up on my doorstep. She had a length of string knotted around her that was scratching her neck, and my then-girlfriend and I cut the string off, took her to the vet, got her all cleaned up and named her Emily. She was immediately kind and affectionate, and it was a charming little household for a good long stretch.
Months and months later, Emily didn’t come when we called her and rattled her food dish. Cats are cats, I know, but she’d not done this before, so the ensuing days were spent putting up LOST CAT posters and walking and biking the neighborhood calling for her. She’d disappeared. We hoped for the best but imagined the worst, and just as we were giving up, we were sitting on the porch and talking about it, and we heard a faint, weak mew. She’d evidently been under the porch for days, hungry, thirsty and scared, and when we reached for her we discovered she’d obviously been injured, more than a bit. She’d been hit by a car, and had some internal damage, and we took her again to the vet, who told us it would require surgery, and would cost several hundred dollars, which relative to my station in like thirty-seven years ago was more than a couple of month’s rent, and more than we could hope to afford. Nonetheless, Emily was dear to us, and after a short deliberation, we sunk our minimum-wage earning selves into debt. We held a benefit party in the back yard; it was named Emil-Aid, as it was around the time of all those AidFests of the ’80s, and we raised enough to take the sting out of what we owed, and Emily came home walking gingerly with a cone collar around her neck. Over the next few months, we nursed her back to health, and in the end, she healed completely.
Then, fully healed, strength regained, without the vaguest hint of any dissatisfaction, she wandered away one morning, never to be seen again. No good deed, said Clare Booth Luce, goes unpunished. We probably spent two or three more months after Emily’s ultimate disappearance paying what remained of the vet’s bill. She was dear to us, but we couldn’t help but take it both personally and poorly when she reacted to our heartfelt twenty-something doing of the right thing despite the dictates of pragmatism by walking into the sunset with an upturned tail.
I do hope she wasn’t hit again, but buyer’s remorse hits hard when the one for whom you’ve bought something- like a ninth life, for example- simply sniffs and walks away.
And so it is with the pantry cook over whom we all fretted last week; there was the cracked rib, and there was the substance-addled nephew. There was the sprained ankle and the sudden loss of a close friend. And each of these was, to us, something of a 1986 vet bill- more than we could afford at the moment, but the right thing to do. We covered shifts, we paid sick pay, and we were as gracious as we could be. And this morning, that calico cat of a pantry cook texted me to say she wouldn’t be back, and we’re all standing around scratching our heads, because none of us saw it coming for a minute. Wednesday and Thursday, the calls for a wellness check, the scrambles to get her family’s emergency numbers, and the extended chats with police and 911 call center staff and the gleaning of her address from her as-yet-unclaimed paycheck were all given in the hope that she was okay, and when she resurfaced on late Thursday to say she’d return on Saturday, we breathed a collective sigh of relief. Now, it’s just another in a long series of sighs of exasperation.
A pantry cook can be replaced, but a relationship with someone you’d trusted- that’s a more difficult loss, one over which I’m hoping not to remain embittered. I will, however, consider drowning my sorrows somewhat in this week’s Willamette Valley wine tasting.
And if you’ve got sorrows of your own to drown, or even if you’re currently without sorrow but want to stock the cellar just in case, this is the week to do it- the clock is ticking, and every day that we’re open between now and Labor Day, you can still pick up any six bottles from our shop at ten percent off, or any twelve bottles at fifteen percent off. It could handily add up to the equivalent of a free bottle, or even two, depending on what you’re shopping for.
So the interviews will begin anew- I’d been so happy that we’d seemed to have stanched that outflow of dilettante coworkers, and now we’re back to a steady flow of applicants, most of them with work histories of three and five months at a time at restaurants that are less farm-to-table than freezer-to-fryer, and we cross our fingers again, hopeful that this new hire will be the last one for a bit longer than the previous last ones. Wish us luck.
Love,
Doug and your other friends at Feast