employablog

I got a call a few weeks ago from a very tired, heavily accented voice.  It was Hassan, the general manager from the restaurant I pretended to work at while looking for work, money and validation.

He was calling to reserve me, apparently none of the restaurant staff was available on Sunday, Feb. 25.  I left on great terms, and I loved the multicultural characters I worked with at the restaurant.  The only thing I didn’t love was being a waiter.  I want to join tables, have a glass of wine and hang out.  Or I hate them, and wish they would go away.  Neither of those are waiterly traits, and the dichotomy killed me.

Also, I apparently have a panicked look on my face during any rush, and I spin around.  I don’t feel like crying, but I give off that vibe.  Also no good.  I’m much better at being served rather than serving, and luckily that’s how it is.

But I accepted, wanting to see my restaurant friends and help out Hassan, who, as most small-time restaurant managers are, is the most over-worked man in the history of Man.  But back at the restaurant, I felt it, I knew that I had put in my time, and I was right back where I started, doing real work, because waiting and bussing is real work.  But then something amazing happened — it was Oscar night.  I don’t care about Oscar night, but most people do, so come eight-O-clock, the restaurant was scant.  Very scant.

The other waitress and I drank, we ate, we ordered desert and we ate more. I caught up with Jesus, made sex jokes with Cesar, and talked family … and more sex … with Eddie.  I caught up everyone with my life, caught up on theirs, in a perfect snowglobe of a moment, preserved from the blizzard outside, candlight playing liquid off the wine glasses.

Waiting tables was never that bad after all.

For the previous four years, the few of my high school friends who wound up on the East Coast for school (including, of course, Employee Too), met in Boston or NYC to hold a Thanksgiving away from home. “It’s cheaper,” we said. Well, it was cheaper than flying home but I don’t think that’s why we did it that first year, and it’s probably not why we kept doing it all through college. It is definitely not why we gathered in Employee Too’s converted warehouse loft apartment in Brooklyn this weekend, as most of us are now holding down pretty respectable jobs.

These Thanksgivings are epic; they are grown up and immature, drunken and philosophical, warm and complicated. I am continually amazed by my friends from home and the relationships we’ve been able to maintain. There are some guys who know my entire history, and whose whole histories I know. We get together to keep ourselves updated on the twists and turns of each other’s lives, so as not to lose track of the narrative. It’s what make these Thanksgivings so important.

I’m sure at some point we’re not going to be able to hold these annual Thanksgiving reunions… other obligations will almost have to interfere. But I hope they don’t interfere anytime soon because the past five Late-Novembers have been incredible.

At least when the time comes that we are responsible for our own Thanksgivings with our own families, we are going to have a pretty significant head start on the rest of our peers who spent their early-twenties dutifully trekking home to their parents or their girlfriend’s parents or whoever most people have Thanksgiving with. We’ve got three pretty successful Turkeys under our belt, an amazing stuffing recipe, vegetarian know-how and well-honed sense of how much wine to buy. When the time comes, I will be sad and ready.

This weekend almost all of my best friends from college returned to Boston for the big football game. Though we’ve only been graduates for five months, the weekend had the feel of a massive reunion. We traded stories of our glorious college days as if they happened years ago, and made pilgrimages to the old haunts like they were our ancestral homelands. In the mornings, we “slept in” until 9:30, when everyone’s body woke them up out of a newly-formed habit.

Everyone kept talking about how much they missed Boston. Obviously the experience was different for me - I haven’t had a chance to develop nostalgia because I never left. I didn’t feel sentimental until I put my last friend on the Red Line back to the airport. Then it hit me that the previous three days had been temporary, that this weekend wasn’t the beginning of another semester with all my friends, only a reunion. Probably the last one for a while.

With vague promises to visit cities scattered across the country, we all hugged and said goodbye and I walked home to do the dishes.