Thursday, June 21, 2012

Hot Flash Cafe, I Knew Ye Well...Or Not.

I just spent a few minutes looking at the last few entries of “Hot Flash Café.”  Sixty-two essays written over the course of four years, inspired by the trials and errors of my short-but-way-not-short-enough tenure as a restaurant owner.  Pretty damned passable essays, as a matter of fact.  I’m surprised by how decent the writing is.  Given that most of the time during those years my batteries were depleted to about 15% of full power. 

But, the thing is, it’s like reading about someone else’s life.  That five years was such a…time out of time.  It was really like no other part of the rest of my life.  Though I thought that all I had done, career-wise, had led up to it…I was lost, clueless and completely unprepared from Day One.   And once it was over, I wasted no time putting it in the past.   Like a particularly grueling course of study…or a prison sentence.  When you get to the end of something like that, it seems you run as fast as your little legs can carry you to put distance between you and it.  At least I did.

So when I take a few moments to revisit the whole thing, what I feel most is a kind of disbelief that I spent years in that situation…and not that long ago.  I (evidently) went into it with nothing, and brought nothing away from it.  Just…wasted time.  Honestly.  I sometimes wish I could ask for a “do-over.”  As it is, it looks like I’ve decided to just cut those years out of my life and bury them in a hole in the back yard.  And am attempting to solder together the neatly cut ends to form a more-or-less seamless transition between 2006 and 2011.

But the ends don’t…quite…reach…

7 comments:

  1. Treading gingerly in my comment, Lisa, for it's not easy to come to terms with what you feel as lost years. Put it down to experience? Anyway, perhaps the best way is forward without looking back.

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  2. Lisa - Sometimes I have this fantasy that we're finally through this horrible chapter in our lives, and I plop down in a chair in a place I feel is "home" and I say "wow....that really sucked!" This whole New York era has been a painful debacle. I understand what you're saying about sensing wasted time. And all of a sudden, there doesn't seem to be that much surplus time to waste.

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  3. I could use a few "do overs....."

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  4. I've been there hon, and know how horrible it makes you feel. It wasn't easy but I finally managed to accept that it was a part of my life that I failed at. What helped me was reminding myself that I did my best. that is all one can do.

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  5. I don't know, Barb.... I don't feel horrible about it, really. I just don't go there. And I don't think I'll be tempted to "go there" anytime in the foreseeable future. Because I honestly don't think there's a whole lot that happened during those years that bears revisiting.

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  6. I'd like to say that no circumstance is a waste of time...but actually I do think I have had a similar bad experience (think AZ) and not sure what there is in that time for me...well, except I learned a lot about mean people....

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