Not Likin’ Me Much….

Sleep deprivation and stress seem to be turning me into a person I really don't like very much.

Time was, when I hired a new employee, I could observe how that person learned, analyze his/her talents and strengths, ferret out the weaknesses, and—taking all those things into account—almost immediately turn that newbie into a functional member of the team. Not so much anymore. I just do not have the patience.

Three weeks ago, I hired two young men—one twenty-two-years old, and one twenty. Each of these kids possessed a resume that included some months served in some kind of commercial cooking environment; and each had some degree of formal culinary schooling. On paper, they appeared to have what it took to make them successful candidates for a cook's job at the café. Yet it took less than three weeks for both of them to go down in flames.

I'll just say here and now that, after all the staffing hassles I've encountered since buying the restaurant four years ago, I take nothing, and I mean NOTHING, for granted. I no longer bring people on staff with an expectation of success. I find it hard to even stand back and wait to see what happens. My attitude is more like, "I know the highest probability is that you are going to suck, or if you don't suck NOW, you'll suck shortly down the road. Prove me wrong…!"

I hate having that attitude. I hate expecting the worst from people. Negative thinker that I have always been, I have up til now had a way of expecting good from people. Expecting honesty, respect, empathy and a knowledge of some kind of decent work ethic. But somewhere along the line, the things I just took for granted from people have become almost extinct. These qualities are not only not part of prospective employees personalities; the words are hardly in their vocabularies (and they would not be able to spell them if they were…but that's a rant for a different day.)

Recently, I've been doing a lot of thinking about my work. I realize that I have been working myself to death just keeping the doors of the café open. I'm wearing every hat, doing every job, nose to the grindstone, hardly looking up to even see or recognize the faces of the people who inhabit my world. The customers. The staff. I don't know their stories, and I can't care about them. I have too much on my plate to care about the people. And there is something drastically, tragically wrong with that picture.

I feel like, within the next, say, six months to a year, I'm going to have to make a choice. Because just opening the doors and serving food is not what I want my business to be about. I have to be able to disentangle myself from the eternal knot of bullshit that has ensnared me since I took over the café. It seems like it's been drawing me in deeper and deeper, binding me tighter and tighter, until I can't pull far enough away from it to see the Big Picture. To BE the moral business owner I want to be. To care about my staff, the customers, ALL the people I come in contact with every day. And act accordingly.

What I have to figure out is, the way people are these days, CAN I care about them? Because part of the problem is that I have a really hard time caring about people who can't or won't reciprocate in any way. Have people become so self-centered, greedy and rude that I just can't find a way to care? It's not that I expect kudos or gratitude or…really, anything positive when I go out of my way to be kind or fair or respectful of people. I just don't expect to be treated like crap…which, unfortunately, is what happens most of the time these days. It's my misfortune that I tend to treat people as they treat me. Altruistic I am not, apparently.

So what I know is that I don't like this person I have turned into since I bought the restaurant. What I have to figure out is if I can change that, or if I just have to…bail.

Painful Encounters

I'm trying to decide whether I'm just overtired, or if hyper-sensitivity is something I've always had, but is serving to make my current life that much more difficult.

This business of long-term employees leaving "the nest" has been much harder on me than I would have thought.

Because we live in a small town, I can't help but casually encounter just about everyone who ever worked for me. I'd have to never go out and about in my own home town if I wanted to avoid these meetings. (Not very practical...but I have to admit, somewhat attractive, at the moment.)

Saturday afternoon, we had company, and since my own restaurant closes at 3 pm, we decided to try one of the other local eateries. It's good to keep tabs on what the competition is up to, anyway. But this particular place happens to be where one of my lost employees obtained employment (BEFORE giving me her notice...) I hoped against hope that Ms. Former Employee would not be at work that day. But I only had to glance through the glass as we headed for the entrance to understand that was a vain hope.

She saw us immediately. I smiled, waved.

We sat in this nearly empty restaurant in the middle of the afternoon, and Ms. Former Employee did not come any where near us. Avoided us like the plague. Hid in the back room, I think, when possible.

This girl who shared my Thanksgiving table two years ago, will now not even speak to me.

Who knows? It may not be that she hates me. It may not be that I am the total scum of the earth (which is how I felt.)

It may be that she was just so uncomfortable about the way we had parted that she couldn't deal with my presence on any positive level.

I held it together as long as we were at the restaurant. Made believe it didn't bother me. Pretended not to care.

And when we got home, I excused myself to my bedroom sanctuary...threw myself on the bed and sobbed like a toddler. Just for a few minutes...

I told my sister I was happy I had never had kids.

Because if other people's kids could break my heart like this, being rejected by my own children (and they WILL reject their parents, at some point...it's part of their job description) would probably kill me.

Take That…

I did something mean today.

I got home from work about 2:30 this afternoon. And, it being the first nice day we've had in, well, forever (the local news says we've suffered through 21 straight days of rain, including rainfall amounts in the last two days equal to the normal rainfall for the entire month of June…), all I wanted to do was flip a couple of cups of sunflower seed into the feeder, sit on my back deck, soak up the sun and watch birdie TV. Quietly. No noise. No music. Just the soft chatter of the avian diners and the buzz of the occasional fly or wasp drifting by. A glass of pinot gris at my elbow and a mindless game of spider solitaire on my lap. Was that too much to ask?

Well, of course it was. Next thing I know, one neighbor's dog is barking, through the fence, at the other neighbors, who evidently have company and have chosen to give the "grand tour" of their back yard. From ten feet away on my left, I'm suddenly hearing:

"WOW! ARE THOSE STRAWBERRY PLANTS?"

"DO YOU USE THAT GREENHOUSE MUCH? HEH-HEH…NOW I'M GONNA HAVE TO BUILD ONE…"

"ARE THESE MORE STRAWBERRIES? OH, BLACKBERRIES, HUH?" (Like you could confuse the two….?!)

…and so on.

Now, these neighbors have vexed me much. They cut down the trees that screened my yard from theirs. They built Disneyland in their back yard. They send smoke of burning rubbish piles through my open windows. They till their garden at first light on Sunday morning. Most recently, they have acquired a chicken. A chicken, for gods' sake. Do you have any idea how LOUD one upset chicken can be? In a neighborhood where a dozen backyards snug up to one another in the space of about three acres? And this chicken is housed maybe fifty feet from my bedroom window?

So, this afternoon, their noisy stupid garden tour ten feet from my quiet sanctuary sent me over the edge. I stood up, retreated to my family room, opened all the windows and doors, and turned on the stereo. Loud. So that I could hear it clearly from my refuge on my back deck. Wanting only to drown out the unwelcome intrusion from the other side of the fence. Sort of.

The CD that happened to be in the queue was Kenny G. So it's not like I blasted them out with Led Zeppelin or anything.

I assume they were pissed. Almost immediately, they drifted away from the fence. Withdrew to their own deck, which is at least as far away as they can get from ME and still be in their own back yard. And within five minutes, they departed from there into their house.

"Hmmm…" I mused wickedly. "Well done!"

I half expected them to come knocking on my door to complain about how rude I was.

But I had my retort handily prepared:

"Tell that to your CHICKEN at 6:30 on Sunday morning…."

Found Him…

Last night, I chose to rub salt in a wound that had not healed over as much as I had thought.

I had heard on the grapevine (from my manicurist—the resource library for all of the county's juiciest gossip) that one of the major restaurant players in The Next Town Up The Road had recently lost its chef. Using what deductive powers haven't yet been compromised by my chronic state of overwork and undersleep, I put two and two together and guessed that this was where California Chef had landed. So, last night, husband and I made a little "market research" field trip up the road to see what was shaking.

And yes, there was my ex-chef, toiling away in the open kitchen of the pizza restaurant-cum brew pub-cum comedy club-cum whatever else will put butts in the seat, which has also been struggling to add "dinner house" to its list of various personae. And while I am the first to admit that, in our-pint-sized demographic, success is built upon how many market niches an eatery can successfully fill, Pizza Pub Up The Road has enjoyed about as much success in the dinner house category as has the Hot Flash Café.

There are reasons for this; reasons that became more abundantly clear to me during the ten months I personally struggled to morph the Hot Flash Café into something that would optimize California Chef's talents. The truth of the matter is, there is an extremely limited market, out here in the exurbs, for what California Chef does best. He can make beautiful, tasty, trendy food. And that, unfortunately, is not what our customers are looking for in a local restaurant. They want clean, friendly, edible homey stuff. If a restaurant can kind of nudge them toward the 21^st century without their knowing it, they're good with that. But they are definitely not looking for nouvelle cuisine out here. If they want trendy, they make a day or night of it and go into "The City." Or they go west to one of the more upscale communities on the beach.

When California Chef took his leave of us, it didn't take me long to realize that he had to leave…that we were never going to be able to make proper use of what he had to offer. I thought, "Okay. Failed experiment. Chalk this one up to experience and move on." But as cantankerous and hard to get along with as the kid had proven to be, I had made a sizeable emotional investment in him. I really believed he had talent and a bright future, even if it wasn't with my restaurant. As much as, in the end, his leaving was obviously best for everyone, it was not painless for me to see him go.

If only he HAD gone on to somewhere that his talents could be nurtured and properly utilized. But, no—he's at a stupid, small-town restaurant of ambiguous identity that is really just a bigger, more ambitious version of the Hot Flash Café. Churning out humdrum food that is NOT his, to keep the unimaginative patrons happy, while straining to attract a market that does not exist with specials like "Halibut Picatta."

My greatest regret with California Chef was that I worked elbow to elbow with him for ten months, and couldn't teach him a damned thing. I knew I had little to offer in the way of teaching him how to cook, but I had hoped I could impart some wisdom about how to run a kitchen, how to assemble and relate to a staff, even what kinds of food might appeal to our demographic. Seeing him last night, ramming his head against the same brick wall he'd encountered (erected?) at the Hot Flash Café, it really brought home to me how utterly deaf and blind he was to anything I had tried to impress upon him during our short and obviously fruitless association.

Within comfortable commuting distance to the city of Portland and its exciting up-and-coming culinary scene, California Chef chooses to go…sideways. Or even backwards.

It was a blow my bruised heart was less ready to absorb than I thought…

May Strikes Again

Just after we bought the café, I was so overwhelmed, yet still so attached to blogging, that I took to making little ten-minute posts just to let everyone know I was still alive.

Well, now there's not really an "everyone" to let know I'm still alive… And, theoretically, I have enough of a handle on this whole thing to be able to carve out some time to create real posts. And I really thought I was past those over-worked, walking around in a sleep-deprived haze days. Unfortunately, we seemed to have back-slid a bit in that…

So here I am with another ten-minute stream of consciousness post, because even though I have no brain left at the end of any given day, I am still attached to this blog.

With Mothers Day out of the way, it might actually be time to lean back and let the café go on auto-pilot for a month or two. NOT! Though I've managed to pull myself together enough to get a few things done in the long-term promotion category, I still have a list of things ten feet long that I want to/need to accomplish. Not the least of which is get the ball rolling on this air-conditioning thing before it gets really hot out. We've had a miserably cold spring (if we were at 3000 feet we would be buried in snow…) that has, up 'til now, saved our bacon air conditioning-wise. But we all know it's going to get warm sometime, and rather sooner than later, I would think. I cannot have my guests trying to choke down a meal with sweat running down into their pasta.

Speaking of Mothers Day, it went rather well. We didn't have any big disasters, reservations were taken and filled promptly, people complimented the hell out of the food, and we had a fairly good sales day. So I'm going to call it a success, though our food cost and labor costs for the week were unfortunately way out of line, so I'm thinking we didn't really make any money on the whole thing. We hope, however, that we did make some friends. And that is what keeps the doors open.

So, yes…Mothers Day went well. As well as can be hoped for a motherless, childless workaholic. These days, Mothers Day just means a day of extra stress and work work work for me. Which is, in the end, probably a good thing. Because May is just a…hard month, if I let myself think about it. Mothers Day and my parents' wedding anniversary were always within days of each other (my folks were married on May 12, 1945). With them both gone, mid-May would be a time of sighing and missing them, if I had ten minutes to rub together to dwell on it. Plus, my sister passed away five days after Mom & Dad's fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1995, so that is not a good memory, either. So though spring—May in particular—is a beautiful time of bloom and renewal in the Pacific Northwest, it is not without its barbs, at least for me.

Ten minutes are up. Time to make the donuts…

Wow. I thought Word had freaked out and eaten this post. But I just found it in some obscure "Auto Recovered Files" panel. Wrote this early this morning, before the rest of the ultimately crappy day had unfolded.

My chef quit today. Just up and said he couldn't get along with any of the staff…hasn't tried, really, but that's a story for another day.

So I guess some re-evaluation, reorganization and re-everything else is in the works.

Yay.

One of the Crappiest Weeks Ever

I posted on Facebook yesterday that I had just made it through one of the crappiest weeks ever.

Now, I know I have had much worse weeks. Like everyone else who has endured life on the planet for more than half a century, I’ve weathered illness, disaster, deaths of loved ones. But those things are in a different category. The term “crappy” would trivialize those life-changing, soul-wrenching times.

But this week was an undeniable shit-fest from the word “go.” I endured all kinds of indignities, up to and including a serious brush with the shadow of divorce court. How about a Crappy Week Re-Cap (Re-Crap?) a la those wonderful (and long gone) Ten Good Things Lists (you knew it was only a matter of time, didn’t you?)

1. First thing Monday morning, my longest term employee--one of the two who are left that I “bought” with the restaurant--hands me her two weeks’ notice. She tells me she feels like she put in her five years, she just doesn’t enjoy it like she used to, and she has a lot of vacations lined up for the summer that she doesn’t want me to have to worry about. Truthfully, this girl has been a steady and dependable presence, and I will miss her…but it IS time.

In the way of all things (at least for me) the change for which I believed I had opted last July when I hired California Chef is taking an entirely different form than I had anticipated. Rather than a kind of gradual metamorphosis, with disenchanted old employees dropping off one by one, it has been much more of a tug-of-war. While I slung my ideas for change over my shoulder and endeavored to drag the café forward, the old employees planted their feet and pulled with all their might in the direction of “We Like Things Just The Way They Are.” It appears that now, nearly nine months later, the rope has snapped, the old employees are tumbling out the door en masse, and the restaurant is going to shoot forward with a vengeance. Can’t say I was really prepared for this turn of events, but it is what it is. We’ll make it work.

2. California Chef is fully recovered from his bout with pneumonia. One would think this would be a good thing, but of course there is a bug in the ointment. During and just after his illness, while I was being particularly solicitous of him and basically running the restaurant by myself, he seemed to have finally developed a respect for me that he had heretofore lacked. I thought, “Ah, now we can finally conduct a healthy business relationship based upon mutual respect. The sky is the limit!” Um…or not.

Is this a generational thing? Have the twenty-somethings upon whom I must depend to run my restaurant (because I can’t run it alone) simply been brought up unfamiliar with the concept of “respect?” For anyone or anything? That would not surprise me, given the political/pop-culture climate of the past ten years-- the years of their coming of age. Respect is a hopelessly outdated concept. But I have to say, ancient relic that I am, I’m having a really hard time figuring out how to relate to and motivate these children. I am not/cannot be their “friend,” and there seems to be no comprehension, on their part, of “boss-hood.” They can be eager and cooperative as long as they are in the mood, but they’ll turn on me like a snake at the slightest provocation. There is no carrot I can dangle in front of them, no stick with which I can threaten them, to alter their performance or their attitude toward me or the job in any appreciable way. They make up their own rules--which I do not know and would doubtless not understand if I did--and when I break one, I suffer.

So, Monday afternoon, I’m showing my twenty-six-year-old chef (yes, I am not only his boss, but I’m old enough to be his mother’s older sister…) how to perform a new task. He is going to take over the provision ordering, and I’m trying to make a point about why we order a certain item a certain way; and he says to me, “This isn’t the first time I’ve ever filled out an order, Sweetheart.”

And any small hope I had cherished that he has finally deemed me and my methods worthy of his respect, melts and runs down the floor drain.

3. I’m sitting in the dining room taking a rare food break, and a regular customer shows me an article in the local paper about, you guessed it, a new restaurant opening in town. Ugh! Looks like here comes the end of “random factors operating in our favor” when it comes to the business…

Seems that a local real estate agent has taken it upon herself to collect a ragtag bunch of small food operations and bring them together under one roof, that roof specifically belonging to the huge empty space a mile up the road which has, in its short history, housed three unsuccessful restaurant concepts. Mostly because it is a huge space, and carries a walloping $7000/month rent, no one yet has been able to generate the sales it would take to pay the bills. And no one is likely to, in this small town. But people just don’t seem to GET that. Ms. Real Estate claims to have the knowledge and experience it takes to “get the restaurant open and get it sold” to some unsuspecting soul, the like of which, according to P.T. Barnum, there is one born every minute. And it will require that the unsuspecting buyer be unaware of Ms Real Estate’s most recent history, which had her pulling the same “bait and switch” with a restaurant in the next town up the highway. Which went tits-up less than a year after she passed it off to some poor slob who didn’t know any better.

So now we all get to take the hit to our sales numbers while we watch another restaurant struggle into existence, limp along for a time and slump to an ignominious end within, what? The next twelve to eighteen months? Augh!

4. The air conditioning project that I have delegated to my husband and my landlord is going exactly nowhere. I cannot have another summer’s dinner sales ruined by our lack of proper air conditioning. But husband, landlord, and any and every local heating/air conditioning contractor we have attempted to enlist do not seem to understand the urgency of the situation. In the two days of over-sixty-degree weather we have experienced so far this spring, the temperature in my dining room has shot up to 80 degrees.

For whatever reason, we have the devil’s own time trying to get any work done on that restaurant. From floor stripping to HVAC maintenance to electrical work, we have been stiffed by just about every local small business that handles these sorts of things. And getting anyone to come out here from “the big city” is like trying to talk a Viking ship into sailing off the end of the earth. One after another, we make appointments that are either blown off without a word, or are called off or postponed to death. This is another instance where I hear how bad the economy is, and how small businesses are struggling, going out of business, laying people off for lack of work…and we have a job available and money to spend, but we can’t get anyone to touch it. WTF???!?

5. And then there was jury duty…

How can I describe (in less than a book) the debacle that was my unfortunate experience with that Constitutionally conferred civic duty? And the perfect storm created when my attempt to fulfill said obligation collided with the restaurant’s busiest day in months, a “B” team front-of-the-house staff (of which the over-worked husband was an integral part), the unexpected illness of a cook, and my cell phone lying forgotten on top of my dresser?

The resultant confrontation between my business partner and myself, carried on in the parking lot outside the restaurant as my unsuspecting foot touched the pavement outside my van oh-so-too-late to salvage the “Senior Night Dinner Service from Hell,” was the essence of the “serious brush with the shadow of divorce court” I mentioned at the beginning of this post.

It was, to paraphrase Lillian Gilbreth in Cheaper by the Dozen, not the penultimate, nor the ante-penultimate, but the ultimate straw.

And that was only Tuesday. Shell-shocked, brow-beaten and emotionally shut down, I had four more days--two of which were twelve-plus-hour marathons--to endure before the crappy week could be officially declared over.

So today is Sunday. Arguably the beginning of a new week (although it is actually the last day of the week on our staff schedule.) Husband and I have hashed out some of our issues (after going three days without speaking.) Staffing hassles at the restaurant have not let up for an instant. And I have the gift of two days off in a row (one of which is already 75% over.)

I have every intention of spending tomorrow doing anything at all that is not restaurant related--preferably fussing with plants and house and yard issues.

I’m so looking forward to a badly needed and richly deserved one-day vacation. And, please...a slightly less crappy week to come.

By Way of Explanation...

A couple of things inspired my previous post: It's kind of a nod to "Poetry Month" (sad and pathetic though it was); and, of course, something happened at the restaurant that upset and frazzled me (more than it should have, I'm sure.)

So I'm cross-posting the following from "Hot Flash Cafe." Perhaps it will help you "get" where the sudden desire to be invisible came from...

I knew it would be difficult; I knew there would be casualties. And I paid lip service (or pen service?) to all that a couple of months ago.

Unfortunately, that doesn't make it any easier to deal with when it happens.

Another of my long-term employees gave her notice on Saturday. I was kind of blindsided by the whole thing; especially since, not three weeks ago, she had sent me an impassioned email about how much she loved working at the café and how she felt like it was home and that she just wanted to work, so I needed to give her x-number of hours every week. So I was a little unprepared for the "I love working here, give me more hours, I quit" progression of events.

I suppose I should not have been surprised. When an employee is stressing out about the job enough to fire off unsolicited emails, you have to guess something is up. It's safe to assume they are not getting what they want, and, in all probability, what they want is not within my power to give. I'll remember that for next time, I guess.

Still, I can't help but wish there was an open line of communication between myself and my employees, so they would not be afraid to let me know when something is bothering them. I try not to act like the Wicked Witch of the West; I try to be understanding, try to be fair; I try to encourage and praise good performance as well as point out failure. Unfortunately, I've learned a few things about human nature. First of all, "fairness" is in the mind of the beholder. If I go out of my way to accommodate YOU, I'm being "fair." If I do that for another employee, it's "favoritism." Secondly, human beings are, apparently, deaf to compliments and hyper-sensitive to the sound of anything even slightly smacking of criticism. So there's almost no point in even bothering to praise. They don't hear it.

If I worked at it, I think I could set myself up to be considered a "friend" to all these young people. But I'm afraid that would involve abandoning any effort to improve or critique anyone's performance. And I'd have to take on the role of "Scheduling Fairy," accommodating their every request ("I need more hours, I can't work THOSE hours, I can't work with so-and-so, I need to take two weeks off starting tomorrow") with a placid smile on my face and a consoling pat on the back.

Sorry. I need to be in charge, need to be able to tell them what to do. Need to tell them when they screw up. Need to try to get them to adhere to my standards, which aren't impossibly high, by any means. So I cannot
be their friend. Because then I would have no control at all. I have little enough as it is.

They say "It's lonely at the top." I couldn't agree more. The thing of which I am on top may not be huge or glamorous, or even particularly high. But it does consume most of my life force. So I keenly feel the isolation of spending seventy hours a week working elbow-to-elbow with people who are not—who cannot be—my friends. And because they are not my friends, it's inappropriate for me to feel sad and betrayed when they exercise their freedom and choose to move on.

Inappropriate. Yes. But there it is. To not acknowledge that I DO feel sad and betrayed would be like trying to ignore the elephant clinging to my back. But I cannot let that elephant flatten me. I have to peel it off, put it on the ground, pat it on the head and keep walking.

So, good luck to my dear departing employee. I hope you find what makes you happy at your new job.

erase me...

what super power

would I have…
I’ve always
thought it would be
To fly but

no…
I choose
invisibility

just think:
do what needs doing
no one knowing
it was me
my hand doing the
cutting or the cleaning
the caress of encouragement
the push of frustration

and so remove
all the risk
all the challenge
all the heartache
of a world with no leaders
and no followers

Guides

Several years ago, events in my life and the world at large started me on a journey away from organized religion and the accepted Judeo-Christian interpretations of the origin of creation. More and more, it seemed to me that the God that humankind had created in its own image was one huge contradiction. An all-powerful Entity which desires a personal relationship with each and every person, yet mandates that this relationship be based upon a slavish desire (on the human being’s part) to curry favor with It (to avoid being squashed like a bug?) A celestial Parent with limitless knowledge and capacity to heal the plagues of mankind, whom we are called upon to love and serve, even while It withholds or capriciously bestows incomplete bits of wisdom and inadequate doses of healing upon Its “children”? The Architect responsible for the creation of every wondrous atom of our incredible planet (not to mention the rest of the universe) who then hands it over to mankind and says, “Here. Do what you want with it?”

I don’t think so…

My most recent discovery in my journey away from traditional religion is an increased awareness of animals and their roles, not only in creation as a whole, but in my life specifically. Lately I’ve noticed that a particular animal will walk (or fly) with me for a stretch of time, and then…go away. Just as I begin to miss and mourn that comforting presence, I’ll realize a new animal has appeared beside me.

First, there were the eagles. While I grieved the deaths of my sister and my father, and puzzled out how I fit into the new dynamic of my family and my own life, it seemed that eagles were “my” animal. I encountered them so frequently and so closely that I eventually became convinced that the eagle must be my spirit guide. Or the essence of one of my departed loved ones returned to comfort and direct me. That conviction was so strong—and so consoling—that when the eagles stopped appearing, I felt sad and abandoned. I still scan the skies and the unleafed spring trees for them when I travel along the river, but if I see one, it is high up and far away. Not close and comforting as they once were.

Last summer, as the young songbirds in my back yard enchanted me with their new-to-life antics, I wondered if perhaps they had taken the eagles’ place. No doubt, they had something to teach this reluctantly aging soul about life renewing itself. But they, like the spring, were soon gone. Not a new spirit guide at all. Just a quick, important lesson.

Yesterday, I drove out to the ocean, down along Highway 30 which roughly follows the Columbia River. As has become my habit, I scanned the skies and the trees for, what I realize now is my former animal guide. All the way out, and all the way back, I looked. No eagles. But I did see…

A herd of elk.

And suddenly I realized that I have encountered elk with increasing frequency lately. On a road to a new beach, we came upon a herd browsing in a sandy scrub forest just off a golf course. Cresting the top of a pass a few miles from home, we were surprised by elk feeding in an open field. Last night, peering through the trees searching for eagles, I didn’t see a bird, but I did encounter a herd of elk grazing in a cow pasture. Elk. What does it mean?

So I googled. “Spirit Guides.” “Shamanism.” “Elk Spirit Guides.”

This was my favorite of what I came up with, from http://www.manataka.org/page236.html#Elk_


When Elk appears it often comes with a message to stand strong with pride and to use ones gifts to show others of its power.

Main Attributes:
• Stamina
• Strength
• Freedom
• Agility


Once again…what does it mean?

Applied to what’s going on in my life right now, it could very well be a sign from the Universe that I do indeed have the stamina and the strength to work as hard as I need to in order to keep that restaurant open. Not only open, but thriving and moving forward. A point which, incidentally, I have been particularly doubting lately. Too many hours, too much stress, too many challenges…perhaps the Universe is saying, “You can do this.”

I’m listening…

Old

I’d rather do anything than housekeep on my one day off every week. I carry out little sneak attacks on the mess in my few free hours on work days, so that I can have my day off OFF. If nothing else, I just need to get out of this little Dodge once a week. So we get in the car and go somewhere every Sunday.

This time, the husband and I made our getaway to Portland proper; more specifically, to the Home & Garden Show at the Expo Center. I got to drool over a $35,000.00 screen room addition for the back of the house; and then scale that dream down to the $3500.00 plywood and fiberglass greenhouse. In the end, we spednt $35 on box of plants—three geraniums and a begonia. Things I’m pretty sure we could afford and am reasonably certain will find their way to pots on the back deck as soon as the danger of frost goes away.

The attack of the Impossible Dreams wasn’t the only thing that put a kink in my day. There was one other experience that has been bothering me ever since.

Making one's way up and down the aisles of these shows, one learns to amble along at a speed just fast enough to take one out of range of the less aggressive vendors' greetings. And you swing your head from side to side as you go, studying each booth surreptitiously, to see if they're peddling something of interest, without letting your eyes linger long enough to make eye contact with the person in the booth.

But any truly motivated vendor is going to try to catch your attention anyway. One such woman called out to me as I glided past her kiosk:

“Are you over fifty?”

“NO!” I called back, startled. Annoyed. I jumped sideways as if something had bitten me, and shifted into high gear to get away from that hideous query, as far and as fast as my arthritic feet could shuffle me.

Well, of course I’m over fifty. But nobody can tell from just looking at me. Especially not from twenty feet away. They have to get pretty close to see the lines around my mouth and the saggy skin on my neck. Don’t they?

At the end of that aisle was the door to the rest room. On the pretext of needing to wash my hands, I ducked inside and hightailed it—slyly—to the closest mirror. I had to have some reassurance that that ridiculous harpy up the aisle must be blind or stupid to have so accurately honed in on my age just by means of a casual glance.

The mirror…merely added insult to injury. Staring back at me in the dim, unflattering light was…an old person. My hair looked like my grandmother’s bouffant on a “big” day. My outfit appeared amazingly similar to something I’d seen on my favorite octogenarian customer on Senior Night. My face was puffy and pale with big dark rings bruising the tops of my cheekbones below the rims of my not-quite-stylish glasses.

Hard to believe I looked older than I felt.

All my life, people have told me I don’t look my age. I got carded for liquor until I was nearly 30. When I tell people I've been married for twenty (twenty-five, thirty) years, they say, “How old were you when you got married? Twelve?”

But now, I’ve got vendors at trade shows picking me out for a fifty-something from across an auditorium.

I have to say, that probably wasn’t the most engaging opening line a salesperson could have come up with. So I’m thinking our age-Nazi sales lady might not have had a very good day if she continued to use that as her “go to” break the ice line.

Still, I am not going to pretend that it didn’t bother the crap out of me… Whatever she was selling, I felt a burning desire to collect it in large piles and borrow the blow torch from the booth across the aisle…

Next Sunday I'll stay home and scrub the bathroom.