Dear Feastlings,
At 6:30 this morning, I was on my way to the plumbing supply store to get a new hose to replace the gas line to our fryer, only to be told that it’s a specialty item that only a restaurant supply will have, and those don’t open for a few hours. This was on heels of a less-dramatic-than-it-sounds instance of one our ovens bursting into flames, and then doing a bunch of plumbing that would have been trivial had it not been during the lunch rush with a bunch of other quite-hot equipment surrounding us.
I came in all set to whine about the difficulties of yesterday and this morning only to have preempted by one crew member’s sick child, another’s critically hospitalized mother, and another’s daughter the victim of a hit-and-run. It turns out that working on my days off and dealing with a handful of small equipment disasters wasn’t really all that bad in context. What penetrated my bubble of self-pity was the realization- one that I have a dozen times or so a month- that the more intense the world gets, the more each of us seems to turn inward, and it would suit us all better to look out once in a while and see that other people are going through it as well.
I found the pandemic alternately encouraging, when people did each other a good turn, and demoralizing when people were buying up all the hand sanitizer and toilet paper to leave everyone else to fend for themselves. And since the pandemic? Not to lay it all at the feet of partisan politics and cults of personality, but we’re not the same people we were six years ago, and I don’t find us terribly pretty. I’m not a New Year’s resolution kind of guy, as it just feels like the sword of Damocles to expect something of myself that I haven’t been doing for years. But if there’s something I’d like to get myself to do more next year than I have this year, it’s to remember that everyone else is going through it, too. Someone has a migraine, someone’s lost a loved one. Someone doesn’t know how they’ll pay their bills, and someone doesn’t have a roof over their head tonight. Someone’s oven caught fire, and someone else’s daughter was rear-ended in a hit-and-run.
So the next person who honks at me impatiently? My challenge to myself is to ask myself what they might be dealing with that’s probably significantly worse than my not realizing the light has changed. Yeah, I worked on my days off this week, but that doesn’t give me the right to preempt everyone else’s plea to be heard, and even less so their need to be offered a handful of kindness.
I can’t imagine I’ll be all that good at it while we have this many literal and figurative plates spinning at once, but I’ll do my level best. The oven and fryer are both working again, the PM staff has all shown up but for one server, and beef Wellingtons are being wrapped as we speak. The wine tasting is set up for Saturday,
and while both the tasting and New Year’s Eve
are filling up quickly, there’s still room for you as of the writing of this missive.
Is there room in my head for anything else? Not likely- we just made the order cutoff for seven different purveyors, we still prepping furiously for tomorrow’s pre-Christmas pickup and for the dinner rush- evidently a lot of you already have friends and family in town. May you drift to sleep with sugarplum fairies prancing on toe in your head, with crumbs of sweets on your lips.
Happy Whatever You Celebrate.
Doug