writing

One man may seem incompetent, another not make sense, while others look like quite waste of company expense. They need a brother’s leadership, so, please don’t do them in. Remember mediocrity is not a mortal sin.

/ fightmasterwrites / Leave a comment

I’d like to speak to the manager!!!

Management is hard.  

That’s what my friend Laura says to me, over and over and over.  

She was my first AGM when I became a manager!

She tells me often that management is hard.  

She is not wrong.  

I had the same conversation today with my front of house manager.  

I always thought the hard part would be knowing the job.  

How to do financials. 

How to manage labor.  

How to make sure the needs of the restaurant were met, like ordering trash bags, and paying the rent. 

Turns out that’s the easy part. 

The hard part is managing people.

The personalities.  

All different.  

Not unlike teaching.  

Who needs a hug? 

Who needs a scolding? 

Who needs to be sent home to breathe.  

Who needs a cheeseburger. 

Thinking back to ALLLLL of the manager’s I’ve had in my life, and it’s been a lot, there is a lot I’ve learned along the way.  

My first manager was a friend of my parents.

She fired me for being insubordinate.  

To her daughter.  

My next manager, chain smoked like a chimney.  Was about five feet tall.  Weighed about 80 pounds.  And was a firecracker.

She put up with no shit.  I followed her from the Georgetown Wendy’s to the North Park Wendy’s.  I stopped working for her when my car died and I could no longer get to Lexington.  

I always joke that when I got hired to be a restaurant GM, I sat down and said who do I want to be like. 

The name that came to mind was Mike Cook from Daryl’s restaurant in Lexington.  

Cookie.  

He was horrible

First question when you got to work was what kind of mood is Cookie in?  If he was in a bad mood, everyone was in a bad mood.  If he was in a good mood.  Everyone was in a good mood.  

He was one of the worst manager’s I ever had, because you never, ever knew who you were getting.   

And that I’ve spent the last 13 summers asking myself what would Cookie do, and then did the opposite. 

For all of my faults as a manager, the one thing that I don’t do is take out my personal mood out on my staff.  If I’m depressed?  If I’m mad about something?  I don’t yell at them.   I put a smile on my face and keep it to myself. 

Last summer, was the first time, I developed crack in my facade.

I had employees who could see the pain.  They helped as much as they could, but to no avail.  

In the past though I’ve had lots of good, and lots of bad manager.  

I’ve had managers who played with my schedule.  

I asked for 10 days off at the Hard Rock.  

The 10th day fell on the beginning of the next schedule.  

I went away on my trip, and didn’t show up for day 10 because why would I be scheduled.  

I was told I was being fired for a no call – no show.  

It took about 10 minutes in the GM’s office dropping the word harassment, and discrimination 17 times, for that decision to be reversed.  

The manager who played with my schedule was transferred about 6 weeks later because of me.  

While I’m on the subject of the Hard Rock, two of the best GM’s I ever worked with were there.  Great attitude.  Fair treatment.  Listened.  Cared.  Treated the staff like gold.  

Back to the subject.  

Managing is hard.  

Managing restaurants is especially hard.  

And it’s truly not for the feint of heart.  

I’ve learned a lot over the past 14 summers.  

Do I still fuck up?

Of course.

Back in 2014 I made a rule for myself.  

If I snap at an employee… 

I buy them a beer at the end of the shift.  

Not literally.

Because that would be illegal.

What I do, is take 20 dollars out of my pocket and give it the employee, to buy themselves a beer after work.  

And I ALWAYS apologize. 

ALWAYS

I usually only have a couple of occurrences a year.  

I won’t tag her in the post, but one of my favorite employees of my GM days, was a girl who hosted for me.  

We butted heads a lot. 

She gave her notice at the end of the third summer, in a letter to my boss.  

She gave him all the reasons that she hated me and that was the reason she was quitting.  

Fast forward six months, and she is working in a restaurant, in another state, and she texts me to say that she was sorry.  

She was wrong about me. 

After working in a restaurant, with actual bad management, she realized that I was quite fair in my expectations.  Was pretty clear in what I wanted.  

And wasn’t so bad after all. 

Since then, she has finished her degree, has two kids and I love watching her grow from 8 states away.    

She is not the only person to share the same sentiments with me.   

To end the story, she was the last customer I spoke to on October 29, 2017 the night before we all lost our jobs.  She was in town visiting and had come to the restaurant to see me.  She sat at seat 51 at the Front Bar and we chatted.  

She left.

I went home.  

The next day when I got to work, the locks were being changed and yellow envelopes were being handed out.

I was told, it’s just business.  

It’s not personal.  

But that’s another story.    

I’m not scared to be seen, I make no apologies, this is me

/ fightmasterwrites / Leave a comment

I’d like to speak to the manager!!!

Gay Pride Edition!

A friend posted my favorite clip from the TV show True Blood today.

You can view it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7l-VVxCLo8

Whenever I see things like this, it reminds me of the decades of my life spent in the service industry.

This one brought back a very specific memory.

In the mid 90’s, I worked at an Italian restaurant, and I use the word Italian loosely, called The Italian Oven. My ex-boyfriend, Jim got me the job there, after I may or may not have walked out of a job at O’Charley’s, after a substitute manager, filling in for a pregnant manager I loved, yelled at me.

I find myself at The Italian Oven. It has black and white checkered plastic table cloths. The table cloths are covered with white craft paper. When you approach the table, you introduce yourself by name and write your name upside down in crayon on the table cloth. It never ceased to WOW the audience.

Fun fact. It takes about 22 seconds to learn to do this when your name only has 3 different letters.

It was a wood fired restaurant, that served mostly pizzas, calzones, and pastas. The food was remarkably not bad, and it’s where I learned to love tiramisu. We had a beer and liquor license and were very busy most nights. I made a comfortable living there, and had a good time most nights.

It’s funny, that I only remember a couple of people from there, so it didn’t make a huge impact on me, and I remember no one’s name but Jim’s.

What I do remember, is that one Saturday afternoon, toward the end of the lunch rush, a table of five arrives, and are seated in the far back right corner of the restaurant.

The server approaches the table.

I don’t remember his name. I can see his face. I can hear his voice. And he was fun to work with.

The one thing that I do remember is that he was gay. Undeniably gay.

The kind of gay, that when he opened his mouth, a purse fell out.

(We said these things back in the 80’s and 90’s).

He was also kind, and lovely, and the best server in the restaurant.

If I remember correctly, he was the person who trained me.

He approaches the table, introduces himself, writes his name on the table, and is responded to with the following:

You gay?

What?

Are you gay?

What?

We don’t want no gay person waiting on us, get us a new server!!!

I’m in the kitchen with a couple of other servers, and the very straight, very redneck, very religious manager who was on duty. We’ll pretend his name is Robert, which I think it was.

He says, Hey Robert, table 43 has told me they need a new server, because and I quote, they don’t want no gay server waiting on them.

They may have used the “f” word. I don’t remember.

Robert wants to know if he heard them correctly.

He is assured that he heard them loud and clear.

Robert says, I’ll be right back.

He might as well have said, hold my beer.

He goes to the table and says, excuse me, I hear that you have a problem with your server?

They reply, yeah we don’t want no gay person waiting on us.

Robert says, well I don’t know what to tell you all my servers are gay.

They question him.

He says, yes, we only hire gay servers here.

They then ask, if he can wait on them.

He replies, well yes, I can wait on you. I do wait tables from time to time, but I’m gay too, so I don’t know what to tell you.

They hem and haw and eventually realize what is happening.

He says, if you don’t mind a queer manager waiting on you, I’ll be glad to get you some food.

Instead, they gather their belongings and leave.

And I’ve never been happier to work for a redneck, conservative, Christian manager.

I’m calm, I’m calm, I’m perfectly calm!

/ fightmasterwrites / Leave a comment

I’d like to speak to the manager!!!

Gay Pride Edition!

Our queer little show closed tonight.

In case you weren’t paying attention, it’s a group of lesbians, who perform skits and songs as drag kings. I’ve had a couple of friends say they were expecting a something along the lines of a drag queen show. This isn’t anything like that.

It’s a full two-hour show. Filled with scenes about irreverent things that we shouldn’t find funny but we do. Think Book of Mormon with drag queens. They walk right up to the line, but never cross it. In fact, we have lots of discussions about whether it’s cool to say or do things. Conversations about consent, audience response, and whether it’s funny or just crude. Sometimes it’s both.

This show, also had two dance groups with us. Friends of the family so to speak. It was a lot of fun, lighting their pieces as I haven’t lit dance in a long time. I was able to do a lot with the 60 or so instruments in the air. I got lucky with the plot from the last group, as we don’t hang and move very little. We change some color and hope for the best.

Tonight’s performance was a little tricky for me.

I started to have a panic attack just as the show started.

For absolutely no reason.

My heart was racing. My hands were shaking. I was a little out of it.

It’s tricky to push buttons on a light board with your left hand, when it already shakes. Oh, and I’m right handed, but that hand was running sound. Add to that, the effects of a panic attack and my hand was insane. So insane that at the end of the first number I hit the go button twice. I was ahead a cue. Then I went back. Then I tried to figure out where we were with the scene change, and as I’m doing that, the curtain opens with work light. Then I hit the button again, and did it twice again. Finally, we were in the right cue, at the right place, and the rest of the light cues for the act were better than ever. But my heart was till racing.

The light cues were correct.

But I get the video ready to play for the end of the act number, hit play and the video starts. It has about 30 seconds of black with just music. I undouse at the end the 30 seconds and there is no video. And I have no idea why it’s not playing. The person on stage is supposed to be lit by the video. She is in static. The music is playing. I’m sitting there hyperventilating.

Finally, about 90 seconds into it, I fade the music. Bring up the house lights and say, motherfucker!!!

One of the kings comes up to the booth, and we hit play and motherfucker, it worked just like it should have. There was absolutely nothing that I did wrong.

We ended up showing the video at the beginning of Act 2, which I think worked better.

The audience was very forgiving, my friends were very forgiving. Adam came up at intermission and gave me a hug. Then the stage manager came up and gave me a hug. The kings gave me a hug.

The anxiety was gone. Act 2 went off without a hitch.

After the show, much of the cast and friends gathered outside the theater before we moved on to the cast party. A very dear woman come up to me and said are you Jeff? I said that I was, and she began to thank me for my work on the show, telling me how much she loved the direction and the lighting. I thanked her profusely, but to be honest, I was embarrassed. In all my days lighting shows, no one has ever approached me that enthusiastically about my work. A complete stranger at that.

By the time I got the cast party, just like in high school, except all the gays, lesbians, and trans folks were out of the closet, and there was booze. Lots and lots of booze, I felt great.

It felt good.

So good that I told them all that we should go ahead and book the theater for November. Let’s do an election day show, the weekend before.

Let’s see if I can convince them of this.

I do hope it’s not another 9 years.

If I loved you, time and again, I would try to say, all I’d want you to know.

/ fightmasterwrites / Leave a comment

I’d like to speak to the manager!!!

Gay pride edition!

I am teaching high school in Cincinnati.

Everyone knows I’m gay.

At the beginning of my third year of teaching, I’m sitting in my office and the phone rings.

I pick it up and there is a woman crying on the other end of the phone.

Through her tears, I make out that she is upset because her son has just told her, he is gay.

Backstory.

The son is not my student. His brother is. I know the mom very well. Her son, in my class, is a great student.

I get her calmed down and she explains what happened.

That morning, before he left for school, there is a discussion, and he tells her he is gay.

She is a very devout Christian, and this message has upset her.

The first thing I say, is how did you respond. Did you say anything that you can’t take back. Did you kick him out of the house.

She had not. He knew she was upset, but he also knew that she loved him.

He left, and she called me.

She wanted to know what to do.

I assured her that if she wasn’t cruel, didn’t kick him out, and didn’t tell him she didn’t love him the rest could be fixed.

We talked for about 30 minutes.

I told her he would be fine.

I told her she would be fine.

I explained that this was probably as hard for him as it was for her.

She was also worried about his health and I assured her that as long as she made sure he was educated he’d be fine there.

I told her about PLAG. The organization for the parents of LGBTQ kids. I explained how to find them. How to reach out. I encouraged her, to go to the group and ask for advice/help/support.

At the end of the call, I assured her that all she had to do was love him. The rest would be figured out.

I have not spoken to the mother in a while. But my student and I are connected on Facebook. Last I knew, his brother was married and had two kids.

Sounds like he’s doing okay.

I hope his mother is as well.

At the shrine of friendship, never say die. Let the wine of friendship never run dry

/ fightmasterwrites / Leave a comment

I’d like to speak to the manager!!!

I wrote the body of this post in May of 2021. It was only posted on Facebook. I’ve been trying to find it for a year now, and it finally popped up in my memories.

About three months before my writing career really kicked off, I’d just opened a new restaurant, something I’m on the fence about ever doing again.

We opened about 10 days before the mask mandate was lifted, along with the need for spacing tables for safety.

In fact, someone called the police on us because they felt that we were seating people too close. Life in the time of Covid.

The opening was a success.

We went from 0 to 100 in about 14 days. Business couldn’t have been better. We were short staffed. I only had one manager, me. And it was a zoo. But we were making money, and that was what counted.

Now for the post from 2021.

My new restaurant just finished week three.

It’s a very big success and we are doing quite well. Through continuous conversations with guests, it often comes up that I moved from NYC, and in a previous life I was a theatrical lighting designer.

A pretty good one at that.

I’m often asked how I got from designing lights to restaurant manager.

Well.

Fun fact.

In grad school, while obtaining my MFA at the University of California, San Diego, one of the best theatre schools in the country, I ran a very successful bar out of my office.

I hosted happy hour every Friday for two years, from 4:00 to close.

Which was sometimes 5:00. But more often 1:00 or 2:00 am. And at least a couple of times, the sun was coming up when we all wrapped up the evening.

I’d often open up for days that were stressful, when we needed a little boost to get through the long days and nights. My mentor Chris Parry, would sneak down on Tuesdays and ask for a gin and tonic.

My regulars included classmates, and unofficially our staff and professors who always pretended they weren’t there. Including the chair of the program.

We also had alumni, guest artists, friends, and strangers.

The crowd could be two people if everyone was in rehearsal.

Sometimes it didn’t even include me if I was teching a show.

Sometimes there might be 30 plus people.

We also had glass bar ware and nothing but top shelf booze.

Bombay Sapphire was our gin of choice. Just ask Sarah EC Maines?

We were also known to deliver at least once during tech. Usually during a 10 out of 12. (A 10 out 12 is when you rehearse a show, with the entire team, including actors for 10 hours in a 12 hour block of time).

We’d take orders and bring all the designers and stage managers their favorites.

It’s also because of these deliveries I now drink bourbon. I got sick during tech for my thesis show, and my classmates kept my Diet Coke cup spiked with bourbon as I couldn’t talk and felt like shit. It got me through 8 days of tech and the show looked great.

I also managed to keep the inventory stocked and the fridge full by charging just two dollars per drink. We had an honor system and house accounts for those of us who ran short at the end of the month.

I was a just as proud of doing this as I was the design work I produced while a student.

When I graduated, my cocktail hour was as much a part of my legacy as my design work.

On the day of graduation, I had a cooler stashed off stage. There were about 25 people who graduated in the department graduation. As we were presented our fake diplomas, we were offered the chance to say a few words.

As long as we kept it short.

I started my speech by saying that I’d spent countless hours, and thousands of dollars to be here today, so I’m going to go a little over my time limit. I spoke for about 15 minutes with bullet points on a piece of paper. This was before I-phones so there is no recording, but I was told it was a good speech.

At the beginning of the speech, my friends Tom and Anjee, pulled the cooler out, and together, we distributed Coronas to all the graduates and professors.

At the end of my speech, I popped the top off my own Corona and toasted the team. I was nearly in tears when I finished.

I miss doing design work.

But I like my life in Maine more.

I’ve said a million times that my studies in California made me the person I am today.

My patience.

My ability to see the big picture.

My ability to deal with different types of people.

My ability to know just how much to dim the lights for dinner. And explaining to owners that they indeed needed to spend money on lights that produced amber light AND NOT fluorescent white light.

My ability to not to stab someone in the eye with a fork.

My ability to train new staff.

All of this is an extension of UCSD.

While I haven’t designed lights in a hot minute, my three years were life changing.

So, a big shout out to Mark Maltby for not shutting me down!

And know that I’m forever grateful for my time in California.

And that’s how I went from being a lighting designer to being a general manager.

I posted this, three years ago, and got a few comments. I want to include it in my archives, so that when I write my book it can be included.

And.

I am doing a show in a week. The first since 2014. Small. But I’ll write about that separately.

Maybe it’s not the moon at all, I hear Spike Lee’s shooting down the street

/ fightmasterwrites / Leave a comment

I’d like to speak to the manager!!!

I was just starting to write a post about work tonight, when there was a knock on the front door.

It’s 10:00. AT NIGHT.

NO ONE knocks on our door at 10:00 at night.

It takes a second for it to register what is actually happening.

I think for a second that Adam has knocked something on the floor.

Adam is asleep on the couch as I get up to answer the door.

I discover that it’s our next-door neighbor Jill.

She apologizes, says she saw the TV on and us sitting in the living room.

We don’t have blinds on our windows. We sit in a fish bowl. She clearly could see we were awake.

She very excitedly says, you have to come outside and look at the sky. You can see the Northern Lights. She goes on saying it’s never this far south and as a Mainer has never seen them before.

Adam gets up and we both go outside.

It a clear night, it’s cold, and the sky is beautiful.

Our neighbors from next door, and diagonally across the street are standing in the street.

It takes a few minutes, but you can see streaks of light across the sky.

It was not the beautiful greens and amber that you see in photos but there is definitely light pulsing through the sky.

We stood outside for about 20 minutes until we both were freezing.

Have I mentioned that the heat is still on in our house on the 9th day of May?

It was very moving and beautiful.

I’m going to go back out while Adam is showering for bed.

I’ll keep you posted on what I see.

Tell me this feeling lasts till forever…

/ fightmasterwrites / Leave a comment

I’d like to speak to the manager!!!

I was awake at 2:30 this morning.

Which is a new thing, as I’ve been sleeping better than ever for the past three months or so. Seems a new job, new me, new car, new knee makes a difference in my life.

Why was I awake at 2:30 this morning?

Because I was consumed with things I can write about, that have nothing to do with the day to day service of my current restaurant.

Over the past month, I’ve created a list of potential topics.

Currently I have 287.

That’s after, spending 30 minutes last night, just brainstorming.

At 2:30 in the morning.

At some point I put my phone down and fell asleep.

I wonder if my writing friends of whom I have a lot, find themselves awake in the middle of the night, creating stories.

And it’s true, I have lots of friends who write and are published authors. Plays, Novels, Poems. Movies, etc. Some on the NY Times best seller. Some with Emmy’s. Some self-published. Some produced playwrights.

Some who do what I do and write for fun.

Long story short, its sometime hard to turn it off, when my brain gets going.

It’s also a lot more fun than it used to be, because those were stress posts. These are fun stories of my past. First jobs. Worst jobs? Great jobs? Embarrassing jobs.

So much fun.

Meanwhile.

I need to start writing 12 posts a day, so that I can get ahead of my list.

Now.

I need to get home.

I’m tired and tomorrow is Valentine’s Day.

We are busy. And it’s all 2-tops.

I’ve got to come in early, and create a new floor plan with all the tables pulled apart, just enough so that couples don’t yell at me.

I’ll wrap up my post by saying, if you get a pedicure the Sunday before Valentine’s Day, you have to wait because every girl in America is doing the same thing. And they charge you premium pricing.

It was my first since my knee surgery and my toes looked live hooves. I tipped her ten million dollars.

It ain’t so much a question of not knowing what to do…

/ fightmasterwrites / Leave a comment

I’d like to speak to the manager!!!

It’s funny.  

My day is filled with, lets write about that.  

Let’s write about this. 

Then I sit down to write and sometimes it’s there.

Sometimes I feel like it’s the first time I’ve written and can’t think of a damn thing.  

So, it is today.  

As a result, I’m going to comment on a post from this week.

On Friday, I wrote a post about a friend passing away.  

The first line of the post was:  But who would I be, if you had not been my friend. 

Most of you read my posts on Facebook.  

Because of this, you probably don’t know that on my blog, where I repost, I have a title to start the post.  

On my post from 3 days ago, it was, But who would I be, if you had not been my friend.  

What you don’t know, and my guess is, the people who read my blog might not know, if that the title is 99% of the time a lyric from a song.  And 99% of the time, it’s a lyric from a Broadway song.  

Sometimes it takes longer to find the right title than it does to write the post.  

And sometime, I come up empty handed and use a non-musical lyric, or sometimes I just leave it blank. 

But when I can, I love to find a lyric from a musical that is a comment on the post.  

If you’d like to see my blog, or even better share it with a friend the posts can be found here:

https://wordpress.com/view/id-like-to-speak-to-the-manager.com

I’ve sometimes wondered if I should include the lyric on Facebook, but except for the one time because it was so perfect, I have not.  

Let me know what you think, and if I haven’t said it lately, thank you for listening to my stories.  

I smile. I don’t complain. I’m trying to keep sane as the rules keep changing.

/ fightmasterwrites / Leave a comment

I’d like to speak to the manager!!!

In September of 2023, I approached the owner of my current restaurant about working for him.  

I’d had the summer from hell, as you all know.  

I’d been told that I couldn’t take a day off, after working sixteen 6-day weeks.  

I said fuck that, and decided to explore my options.  

One of my options was to reach out to my old boss from ten years ago, and see if there was any possibility that he’d have space for me.  

We talked over the course of three weeks.  

The conversations were part interview, part venting, part just being friends. 

At one point, he told me that he had concerns about my writing.  

He was very clear, that he’d never tell me to stop. 

 He’d never edit what I wrote. 

Nor would he censor what I wrote about.  

But.

He did think that I often demonized the guest, when telling my side of the story.  

We didn’t discuss it for long, but he had made his point.  

We moved on.

However, I heard what him.  I thought it about it.   

He was not wrong.  

I did demonize the guests occasionally.

Probably more than occasionally.  

I wasn’t always empathetic to their side of the story.  

Within days, I started to write differently.  

I approached the stories differently.  

That’s not to say, I didn’t still share the evil, horrible things people did and said to me, but I tried to frame it in a different light.  

I was ultimately, offered the job, and I turned it down.  

I was promised, gold and silver and shiny things if I stayed.   The owner of my old job, actually cried when I told him I was going to leave.  Looking back, I realize I had seen this on a Lifetime movie before.   

Fast forward a year, and I have the new job, and I’m in a much different place.  

The reason I share all of this is because several of you have reached out to share that you noticed that I seem lighter.

Last night a friend texted that she liked how calm most posts are now.  

Another friend asked if my restaurant didn’t have assholes that dined there.  

The truth is.

I’ve changed.  

Because my circumstances have changed.  

Yes, there are still assholes.  One is sitting upstairs at table 22 right now.

Yes, there is still stress.

There is always stress. 

But it’s kinder, gentler stress.

It’s what one might call normal stress.  

I’m also generally not tired when I deal with It, because I didn’t work a 12-hour day the day before, then drive an hour, and get 6 hours of sleep.  

I’m also very much supported by my boss, who is a collaborator.

 Who asks my opinion and then considers it.  He might say no, but he doesn’t make me feel stupid when he does.  

So.

Yes.  

I’m lighter.

And because I’m lighter, I write about different things these days.

And the things I write about are considered differently.  

Last night, at 1:30 in the morning.  I couldn’t sleep.  Not because of stress, I just couldn’t sleep.  

So, I pulled out my phone.

Opened the Notes app.

And listed things I could write about. 

In all seriousness, about 50 new subjects.  

And not one of them victimized a guest.  Or an employee.  Or a manager. 

They are stories from my past.  

Colorful stories of the golden era of Jeff’s youth.  

Stay tuned.  

But who would I be if you had not been my friend?

/ fightmasterwrites / Leave a comment

I’d like to speak to the manager!!!

I’m old.  

Much older than I ever thought I’d be.  

Seriously.  

I remember reading about HIV and AIDS in the early 80’s thinking that it was a big city disease. 

This was long before I told the first person that I was gay.    

I would sneak off to Lexington, where the boys were, and although I’d think about the stories on the news, it was definitely a big city problem.  

Then I moved to Atlanta, and I found myself in a big city, and the reality of the disease was everywhere. 

You didn’t go on a date, have a one-night stand, or even kiss a guy, without thinking this might be the one. 

Not the one you marry, but the one that passes along the death sentence.  

This worry continued when I moved back to Lexington, and became a BIG worry when I moved to NYC.  

I’ve known hundreds of people who were positive.  I’ve dated lots of men who were positive.  

I spent my adult life not wondering if I’d become infected, but when.  

But somehow, I’ve managed to skirt under the wire and remain healthy.  

This is not a post about AIDS.

It’s a post about me being old, and believing I’d never live to see old.  

But here I am two months away from turning 59.  

How the hell did I get here?

I say all of this, because tonight a friend from college, one of my best friends from college, texted to ask if I had time to talk.  

I didn’t, but I hadn’t heard from her in several years, and I worried something was wrong.  

So.  

I called her.

Even though I worried something was wrong, I knew why she was calling.  A beloved professor from our undergrad days passed away this week.  

He taught theater, in a very small theater department, at a very small college.  

Even if you weren’t in the theater department, chances are you knew.  The school was that small.  

I was correct.  She was calling to chat about George.  

We reminisced for a long time.  He had been a big part of our formative college years.  The department was so small, that if you were cast in a show, you were also building the set, selling tickets, and you might be expected to go in search of a dining room table. (We borrowed my parent’s dining room table for You Can’t Take It With You).  

At one point, I said it kind of sucks to be so old that the older people in your life start to move on.  

And it is.  

It’s been 40 years since I started college.  And it’s been 39 since I met George. And even if we weren’t talking every day, you still see their lives happen through friends, through college posts and social media.  You are still in each other’s lives.  

But that story is changing. 

My parents have moved on. 

My Aunt Doo has moved on. 

My friend Chris has moved on.  

My friend Tony has moved on. 

I’m starting to know way too many people my own age, that have gone on a trip they won’t return from. 

This idea of a journey is not new to me.  My friend Tony from Atlanta was the first truly close person to me, to die from AIDS.  We hadn’t spoken in a few weeks.  I was scheduled to visit him in Atlanta.  He had been positive for a bit.  He took a turn for the worse and past in three days.  

When I learned of this, it felt as though he’d gone on a trip, and I was just waiting to hear from him when he returned.  

I’m still waiting.  

………………………………………….

My friend and I joked about our age for a few minutes, then I changed the subject and asked about her daughters, her mom, her job.  

I invited her to come visit Maine.  

After a bit, we said our goodbyes and hung up.

I sat at my desk thinking about the conversation.

About my professor.

And I thought to myself, that I don’t find myself sad about the permanent journeys my family and friends have taken.  I find myself glad that I was a part of their life on earth.  That for a brief moment, we shared the same spacesand the same stories, and that they probable never knew the ways they made my life better.    

For someone like me, who struggled in college, to find myself,  they made my life tolerable.  

They taught me to love myself.  

To find the best in the world.  

All of these people laid the ground work,  that has allowed me to create the life that I have today, and  be happier than I have ever been.  

Life is good.  

And it’s because of George. 

And Chris.  

And Ton.  

And my mom.  

And my dad.  

And my Aunt Doo.  

All of these people created space for me.

Ultimately.  

They loved me

I am eternally grateful for all of them.

PS.  Thank you for the phone call, Liz Smith.  I’m grateful for you as well.