Since September 25th, 2003

Seven years is a pretty long time to do anything.

HB, "CtT..."

Grumble…

I don't have the statistics here in front of me, but I know (from personal experience) that a huge portion of our living-wage manufacturing jobs have been re-distributed—out of the country. The United States now has what they call a "consumer economy." An economy which can only remain robust when people buy stuff. Not a traditional or even viable economic philosophy, by any means. In fact, it's entirely probable that the concept of a consumer economy was only recognized when it became obvious that was what we have descended into.

Economies are supposed to be based upon making stuff, not buying stuff. We should be making or producing something that we can trade—either for money, goods, or services—on the world market. But here in America, the Fat Cats who are supposed to be concerned with keeping the economy vital, have outsourced all our jobs. And they have charged US with keeping the American economy sound (and keeping THEM rich), by continuing to buy all the stuff they now have made in India or China or Central America, for a fraction of what it would cost them to pay US to make it here. So, they get the money, and we get…what? The incredible honor of serving them in restaurants, hotels, country clubs and casinos…because those are the only jobs left to be had?

Oh, yes…the Service Industry is growing by leaps and bounds. Basically because the poor schlubs whose jobs have gone away get to be employed waiting on the asshats who sold those jobs to the lowest bidders overseas.

Now, I am a card-carrying member of the Service Industry, and I have been for most of my adult life. Since before the entire national economy hung on our every move . For the most part, it was an enjoyable challenge, trying to guess what would be the Next Big Thing, and getting it out there with a smile and a flourish. It was satisfying to make someone happy, gratifying to brighten someone's day. And they would smile, and say, "Thank you!" And everyone would go home and sleep well at night.

Then, four years ago, in the midst of this shift from a real economy to one based on speculation, greed and all kinds of negative abstract concepts, I bought a restaurant. And, boy, have I learned a few things about what it means to own a service business in 21^st-century America. Let me just say it has not done anyone any favors to strap the fate of the nation to our aching backs.

The buzz these days from just about everyone you talk to is that we have forgotten how to give good service in this country. Let me stand up in defense of my industry, for a moment. I have to believe that a large part of the problem is that not everyone is suited to a service job. Many of the folks who have been flung into our industry because there's nowhere else to go do not have what it takes to BE good…well, servants. They're doing the job because it's what there is to do, not because they enjoy it or find it satisfying. And that is a terrible problem for our industry. For all that we are the most over-worked, under-paid segment of the working population, there is a tremendous amount of skill, knowledge, and talent required to do what we do WELL. Someone who was perfectly happy to man an assembly line or work alone in a cubicle in front of a computer screen all day, probably won't be very happy, or very good at, chatting up customers while steaming a milk for a latte to 140 degrees.

And speaking of that 140 degree latte, let me also say that, from MY side of the counter, the general American public no longer knows how to GET good service. To encourage, accept and reward it, rather than to demand it as some kind of entitlement.

When some woman I have never seen before walks up to my counter and barely interrupts her cel phone conversation to churlishly demand a half-caf vente macchiato (which is a Starbuck's drink, by the way…and, um, we are not Starbuck's…) at exactly 140 degrees or she WILL bring it back (and I am led to wonder whether she carries a stem thermometer in her purse…), and sighs and rolls her eyes when we try to establish what she would like to order from OUR menu, raps her acrylic nails on the counter and continues her slightly over-loud phone conversation while we make her drink, takes the drink from our hopeful yet fearful hands, tastes it, makes a face, says, "Tsk…it's fine!" and stalks away, pointedly ignoring the tip jar next to the register…

That's when I know I'm not in Kansas anymore, Toto. And even those of us who used to enjoy serving and satisfying the public, who used to get a charge out of the grateful smile of a contented customer…look at each other and say, "Why, exactly, DO we do this?"

More and more, we are becoming a nation of the "haves" and the "have-nots." And despite the fact that the have-nots outnumber the haves many times over, our culture, our media, encourage us all to look, act, and aspire to BE the haves. Not being rich is not good enough. It is not noble or admirable or even tolerable to be…modest. To be "comfortable." To be barely making ends meet. Because we all have to act like we have money. We all have to have the newest gadgets, the trendiest clothes, the latest adornments. And we all have to demand to be treated like Mr. and Mrs. Got-rocks by any person charged with the unfortunate task of waiting upon us in any place of business. As a result, the Service Industry—that place where more and more folks find themselves toiling—is becoming a less and less attractive place to work. At our sides are people who don't want to be here and aren't any good at it, and from across the counter, a heretofore unprecedented degree of rudeness and aggressiveness is exploding in our faces.

So maybe THAT'S why good customer service seems to be a thing of the past. Ya think?

 

"Vacation" Pictures

Well, it wasn't much of a vacation...two days of not having to deal with cafe issues.

But here is a picture. I'm posting it mostly because I'm not sure I like what flickr has done to my ability to post my pictures here...





Okay...so it worked. Huge. Just like I like them.

BTW, can you guess where this was taken? (no cheating...)

Surviving…

September again. Already. I swear, I'm still trying to figure out what happened to last Christmas.

This summer has flown by. And it's just as well, because I think it has been one of the most miserable summers on record. Weather-wise, our summer didn't start here until well into July. But the weather has been the least of my problems. Except the part where the ONE heat wave we had all season had to come on the ONE weekend when it would do the most damage—the weekend of our big Scandinavian event down south. Probably cost us a couple thousand dollars in sales. Typical of this particular summer, I guess. If it was bad, it was going to happen, and at the worst possible time.

When California Chef took his leave in the middle of May, he seems to have snagged a thread that caused the whole fabric of the café to unravel. We started to shed crew members like my cats shed their winter coats. Systems deteriorated, equipment broke down or had to be replaced, my marriage nearly ended… It was kind of like the Universe was going to show me every bad consequence that could possibly befall us as a result of last summer's bid to "take us to the next level." This will teach you to be "too tired" to properly appreciate random factors operating in your favor. Because those same random factors turned on us like a snake; and if I thought I was tired last winter, I've learned a whole new definition of the word in the past three and a half months.

We lost California Chef; my long-time morning counter girl; Chef's erstwhile but completely unworthy replacement—Ms. California Chef; the woman I had hired to be front of the house manager to replace the Good and Faithful "D" (who is still with us on a limited basis, and still good and faithful); Ms.Pastry Chef; and a parade—I can't count how many… Six? Nine?—of possible replacement crew members, none of whom lasted more than two weeks. Some as little as a day. And, actually, there are reasons why the exit of each and every one of these players is a good thing. But it would have been ever so much nicer had they not all have crapped out at the same time.

Oh…and two of my three remaining long-ish term employees (they have been with us since 2008) are pregnant.

Talk about snake-bit. I've never seen anything like it.

But I don't want to whine about this anymore. Because I'm too tired. And because I'm officially on vacation. As of about 2:00 this afternoon. Until noon on Friday.

I've been stretching my neck out toward this particular carrot since I made the reservations three weeks ago. And now, by golly, I'm chomping on it as if it were my last meal.

And not a moment too soon.

One More Time For All the Old Times

So, it's been 22 days since the meltdown. Not very good of me to broadcast evil tidings and then disappear. Does anyone wonder what's happening? I do. Wonder…

I wonder…is this how other couples fight? It feels so out of the ordinary to be us. We don't have those loud, "he said, she said" arguments. We just seem to suddenly realize how miserable we are. With each other. To each other. And then we try on the idea of being apart. But it just hurts so badly, feels so empty to be so far apart from each other, that we make up our minds to give it one more try. And one more. And one more.

In fact, we had to make it work, at least for a little while. Right in the middle of our biggest event of the year, the one where my whole family is involved, was not a good time for us to come apart. So, as things tend to go, we held it together for the benefit of other people, and found we do indeed still have something we want to hold together. So our fragile truce is holding. Sometimes, the bond between us feels like titanium…other times, like spun glass.

Have I mentioned that I am one of those people who always has music running through her head? Sometimes it's a song that has no meaning…something I've heard on the radio that sticks like glue and plays over and over until I'd happily unload a .44 into my skull just to get rid of it.

But sometimes it's something sent to me…by Someone, from Somewhere. A couple of days ago, I got this song… And I realized it's now Our Song:

Whatever it is, it will keep 'til the morning

Haven't we both got better things to do?

Midnight blue…

Even the simple things become rough;

Haven't we had enough?

And I think we can make it

One more time, if we try

One more time for all the old times…

For all of the times you told me you need me

Needing me now is something I could use

Midnight blue

Wouldn't you give your hand to a friend?

Maybe it's not the end…

And I think we can make it

One more time, if we try…

One more time for all the old times…

Midnight blue

I think we can make it…I think we can make it…

Wouldn't you give your heart to a friend?

Think of me as your friend….

And I think we can make it

One more time…if we try

One more time for all of the old old times….

--Melissa Manchester/Carol Bayer Sager

Awash

Yesterday was not a good day.

It took me longer than usual, after the "signing up" discussion, to digest and absorb the information brought to light therein. But, a week and a half into it, I thought I had built a pretty good foundation for a bridge, leading back to a tolerable status quo in my marriage. Turns out the bridge was made of tin foil instead of steel. It was easily brought down by the husband, with one unwarranted accusation.

As luck would have it, my sisters were in town and got to witness the…well, I won't call it a fight, because we actually didn't argue very much. It was basically a meltdown. MY meltdown. MY coming to terms with the fact that my marriage was probably irrevocably damaged, and I couldn't face living out the rest of my days in the context of this crumbled, non-functional relationship.

There has been this issue of "fault" haunting the husband and me for quite a few years. When things go tits up, and we are both miserable, we seem to invest a lot of energy into whose fault it is. And you know, I really hate that. I hate that fault-finding has become a standard of our society, and I particularly hate that it has invaded my marriage to the degree that it has. But there it is, nonetheless.

So Sunday afternoon, with my sisters in tow, I drove…anywhere. Away from the most recent demonstration of my being not much more than the primary irritant in my husband's life. One sister made a stab at trying to play marriage counselor. "I think," she said, "that you both need to stop trying to blame each other. It's clear that he thinks everything is YOUR fault…"

Now, the circumstances of our married life have found me taking the role of instigator most of the time. If I hadn't, I truly believe we would never have gone anywhere, achieved anything, or made any changes at all in our lives. I dragged us out to Oregon to be with my family. I yanked us away from our life in Eugene to follow a job opportunity. I took us back there when the job failed and my life fell apart. I needed a life, so we bought the restaurant. Our entire married life has consisted of me trying to make it work, and him coming along with me, sometimes willingly, sometimes not. So when things go badly for us, it IS more than likely my fault, to some degree. And I have to live with that.

So when my sister declared that we were each trying to blame the other for our problems, I couldn't entirely buy that. "Don't you think," I asked, "that I carry around a ton of guilt about everything that has gone wrong with our lives? I'll always have that. I'm not trying to say everything is his fault. I'm just trying to say it's NOT ALL MY FAULT. It can't be. I can't own the blame for every bad thing that has ever happened to us. If I did, it would kill me."

I don't know why, but this time, the hurt wouldn't go away. I tried hiding it under some "retail therapy," (shopping at the Goodwill with my sisters.) It just got worse. I dropped my bundle of possible purchases on a convenient rack, went out to sit in the van. And just…cried. And thought. And cried some more.

In fact, I spent most of the day in tears. I haven't cried so much in years. But I was thinking, and planning, and, saying goodbye, really. To my life. To my home. To my restaurant. To everything I believed had been poisoned by, or was poisoning, my dying marriage. Because I had decided that if my choice was going to be between continuing in a relationship where I was nothing more than the biggest pain in my husband's ass, or being alone, I would choose "alone."

Life is too short. The idea of spending my remaining days, however many or few they are, with someone to whom I am barely tolerable on a good day…just didn't appeal anymore. If my fate—my burden—was to fuck up everything I touched, then I needed not to be touching anyone else. I could take full responsibility for screwing up my own life. But I could no longer bear the burden of messing up another person's life along with my own.

We've had Serious Arguments in the past. With increasing frequency, in fact. As time has gone on, I've begun to think I've worn out my welcome as a partner… as I always suspected I would, from the very beginning. And I have said to him, "You know, if you would be happier doing something else or with someone else, you need to do that." I have given HIM permission to leave. But of course, husband being husband, he would never do it. This time, I understood that if the hurt was ever going to go away, if the changes that needed to be made to point us toward peace were ever going to be made, I had to make them. I would have to be the one to say, "I give up. This needs to end. I will leave." Things end. People change. Nothing is forever. No one stays. That is the way of life. I get it.

For the first time in my life, I thought about dissolving the union. I made lists of what would need to be done and in what order. I would find a place to live and move out. (Or should I ask him to move out, and pay for an apartment for him closer to work…since one of the things he has recently confessed is that he hates the house and doesn't really care if we live here anymore…) We would sell the restaurant. And as soon as that was done, I would take any money left over from that and find somewhere to live. Somewhere. Far away from here.

And then he could either have the house (since HE pays the mortgage) or not. Whatever he chose. And if he sold the house, I would ask for some small sum of money from the sale, and that would be that. He would probably move back to the Midwest to be with his family. And it would be over.

I planned and I thought and I said goodbye all day yesterday. And I cried. Pitchers and pails and flasks of tears. I couldn't stop.

Last night, after everyone went home, we talked.

Truthfully, I don't remember most of the details of the discussion. Maybe some things were ironed out. Maybe some hurts were apologized for. Maybe some promises to do better were made. All I know is, enough was said that it gave me hope that we might be able to live amicably together for a few more years. Or months. Or weeks. I don't have to leave. Now…

But I also know…that I can. Leave. If it comes to that.

And that is a powerful thing to know.

Signing Up II

"Not what I signed up for…" I couldn't shake those words for days. Brooded about them almost non-stop. I thought I could bury them under work and other concerns, but they kept rising to the surface like a fresh corpse. For me, there is no such concept as, "Ignore it, and it will go away." I can set things aside until they lose their sting, and go back and deal with them later. But I can't just pretend they never existed and go merrily on my way.

The pronouncement that any endeavor, thirty years in, is not what one signed up for is, at best, grossly immature; at worst, blindly narcissistic. Either you went into the thing thinking you had no particular expectations, and now find that any vague picture of fulfillment and happiness you might have had in mind does not resemble what has actually come to pass… Or you had a specific agenda (that did not take into account any other person who might have been involved in the endeavor along with you…say, a life partner, for example…) which you suddenly realize has not been accomplished. And probably never will be. And time is running out.

So, what? Is the husband a hopeless Peter Pan? Or is he an unfeeling taskmaster ruled by schedules, goals, and quantifiable results? I don't think so. I think he's just feeling tired and old and a bit overmatched by his life. To say that we have a lot on our plates right now would be a laughable understatement.

We may have, in fact, "signed up for" a little more than we are actually capable of accomplishing, at this stage in our lives. At an age when most people are backing off the throttle and beginning to coast into retirement, we are working harder than we ever have. There is a physical and emotional cost to all this, which is harder on a couple of semi-centenarians than it would be on a pair of twenty-somethings. But there are two ways to look at it, really. Though it can be said that, after thirty-plus years together, we'd rather be relaxing in our side-by-side recliners than fending off challenges to the emotional well-being of our partnership; it might also be true that if our relationship did not have that thirty-year strong foundation, we may now be chucking everything, turning our backs on each other and on the challenge, and going off in search of something more fun and more immediately gratifying. Isn't that what children DO these days?

Part of the problem with the husband is that he is NOT the type of person to TAKE control of life. He is happy when he has the underpinnings of job, home and family, and then he kind of takes whatever life happens to build upon that foundation. Oh, he's a hard worker. Tireless and obsessive to the point of workaholism, in fact. But he's not particularly creative or idealistic when it comes to what the job is. His credo is that you do whatever your employer demands, and then some. And you never, NEVER ask for a favor, or preferential treatment, or even for some things you might have earned or deserve after a term of dedicated and faithful service. Which would make him anyone's dream employee. But which also makes him suck as an entrepreneur.

Because you have to realize when you work for yourself, you are not only your own employee, you are also your own boss. Which means you work hard, yes. But you are also the person responsible for rewarding that hard work. If you try to do one without the other, you burn out very quickly. Which, unfortunately, is the place where the husband finds himself at this moment. He still has his "day job," where he works very hard and has been consistently under-valued and under-compensated for sixteen years. But now, rather than coming home and going to the gym or puttering around the garage or whatever else he used to do to let off steam from work, he has the café to work at and worry about. To the point of obsession. And he can't put himself into the mindset that HE is the one who has to take control of some aspects of his life, to tweak it so that it doesn't turn him into a smoldering cinder. He just works and works and works, and then gets put out with me because our life is "not what he signed up for."

For my part, I believed him when he told me that he wanted to partner with me in owning the café. I believed we were setting ourselves up for the time when his job would go away. Which looked imminent four years ago, but these things have a way of dragging out way longer than seems possible. So he's still toiling away for the sinking ship AND trying to help me run the restaurant. Of course, this is an impossible situation for him. But it's just as impossible for ME to run the café without a partner. Especially now, when I don't think I could buy a decent employee with a winning lottery ticket.

We are stuck, he and I, in this protracted limbo…responsible for almost more than the two of us can physically handle. I don't think either of us would have signed up for this had we known it was going to play out this way. But it is what it is, and we have to not only work, but THINK our way through it. It's the thinking part, the planning part, the pro-active "I have to fix this so that it can work for me" part that the husband is not so good at. And, truth be told, he gets pissed off at me when I try to do that part for him. Or suggest that he do it. "This is the only part of my life that I have control over!" he whined to me the other night during the discussion that spawned the whole" signing up" remark.

Fine. Then control it, goddammit. If you won't let me help you fix it, then deal with it yourself. But don't whine to me about what you did and did not sign up for.

Fix. It.

Wow. That was amazingly unsupportive, wasn't it? But it felt SO good…!

Whatever. I'm pretty sure we'll ride out this storm, as we have so many over the years. But sometimes, feeling exhausted, partnerless and friendless all at the same time just…sucks. And this, this blog, is the only place I have to go with this stuff. So I won't even apologize for whining.

Signing Up

What does it mean when your partner tells you that your life is "not exactly what I signed up for?" After more than three decades?

What DID we sign up for, exactly?

What did we know, at twenty and twenty-one, about a relationship that would span almost as many years as our combined ages?

I always thought we got married because we were too stupid not to. We were "in love." That's what people did when they were in love. They got married.

Were we signing up for something? I wouldn't have had a clue what to ask for or where to sign for it. And I've always believed that cluelessness, that naiveté, that "What the hell, let's just DO it!" …was mutual.

Evidently not.

After thirty-five years, I find I am not what he signed up for.

I have no idea where to go with that…

Small World

"To the world you may just be somebody....but to somebody, you may just be the world."

I saw this posted on somebody's facebook status today.

It's supposed to be inspirational. Why am I not inspired?

Could it be because I'm pretty sure I am NO ONE's world...?

Ups and Downs

It's been a day of good and bad.

Had to work. Bad.

Got a lot accomplished. Good.

It's my birthday. Good.

I'm 55 years old. Aauugghh!

Got lost on the way to where I was supposed to buy my birthday present. Bad.

Went shopping somewhere else instead. Bought two shirts, a pair of pants and a jacket—all on sale. Good.

Argued with (at?) the husband. Sigh! Bad.

Found good pasta and Marie Callenders' pie for dessert. Good.

Drove directly beneath two eagles soaring and wheeling over the highway. My first unambiguous eagle sighting in many moons. Thinking this is an excellent omen for my fifty-sixth year on the planet.

The best.