(one week ago)
It may be that in Ithaca, New York—a liberal, knowledge-soaked, university town—the best internet cafe on a Sunday night is McDonald’s. It was the only place I could find open and with internet…and it wasn’t even “open”. I had to sit in the parking lot cramped between my steering wheel to click out a daily write to this week’s partner in my writing group. A sign penned with a faint pink marker was on the outside door explaining that they were short-staffed and could only operate the drive-through.
I’m back this morning, Monday, to Internet—if that can be a verb. It really might be the most convenient place given my location up the hill toward Enfield were I’m staying in a pickle-delivery vehicle — a 2000 Toyota Sienna—on Luke MacDonald’s homestead. (Note the a between the M and c. No relation to Ronald-the-clown who has been hawking American burgers since the 1950s.)
Fortunately, the restaurant is fully staffed this early a.m. and as a bonus, the piped in music is playing hits that were a background to my transferring to the Cornell School of Hotel Administration here in January 1985. At the moment it’s Julian Lennon’s Much Too Late For Goodbyes preceded by Ashford and Simpson’s Solid.
I’ve come back to my college town perhaps a half dozen times since I left for California in 1991. When visiting, I’ve always had a feeling of something unresolved, reminders of the mistakes I made, an extra internal organ sensitive to the terrible depression I experienced before I left. This time, however, it feels like my past here is a finished canvas. I can see all the parts like an elaborate piece of narrative art. There is beauty mixed in with the ugliness and pain.
I’m here to attend the wedding of my old friend Thor to his long-time partner Rachel. I first met Thor through a friend at my University housing coop where I lived from 1985 to 1988. One of my early adventures with him was to go slaughter a lamb for the coop’s formal dinner in which we all dressed smartly each Spring to enjoy an end-of-year dinner in our dining hall.
I was co food-steward at the coop for several years with my first partner Cathy followed by Jackie another year. Together we planned meals for 32 people, scheduled cooking and clean-up, placed food orders, and made runs to the grocery store for things that could not be obtained through Sysco. Jackie and I could carry four full bags of groceries on my little Honda 250: a bag in front, one squeezed between and two hugged by said passenger instead of holding onto me or the bike.
Slaughtering and dressing lambs was not in my job description but this along with the normal responsibilities may be the closest I came to following the career path of a hotelie. The pay was not much—just free meals—but my parter and I could usually breeze through a plan with scheduling and orders in a couple of hours every few weeks.
Slaughtering the lamb, while educational, was traumatic. Thor’s Aussie sheep farmer friend whose rolling pastures were some miles away had a lame (but otherwise healthy) lamb that we could have for cheap. Unfortunately, after tying the back legs for hoisting, the knife placed under the bleating babes chin was found to be too dull for the deed and guess who was chosen to hold the shivering little lamb while the utensil was taken back to the house for sharpening? I don’t remember if I immediately became a vegetarian but in certainly influenced the decision that lasted for most of a decade.
I’d received my college degree by the time I started waiting tables at the Thai Cuisine. It was upscale Asian, black-tie service and I was eager to get in on the big wads of cash I saw my girlfriend bringing home. Waiting tables wasn’t the kind of work most hotel school graduates did. They ran restaurants—whole chains of them. They ran hotels.
Still, I was happy to have found a community which seemed more important than running off somewhere to be in a management training program. I’d also become something of a black sheep in the hotel school before I graduated. Rubbing shoulders with too many people outside the school had turned me into a critic of the corporate world. The liberal university had done its job of making me worldly, pro-union, environmentally-minded and critical of materialism. I wore a red arm band and protested to get the university to disinvest funds from South Africa. On a more personal note, I was scared shitless of being a manager of people. I couldn’t think of anything I was less inclined or capable of doing.
After three years waiting tables, first at the Cafe des Amis, a delicious Tunisian Restaurant where I worked my last year of school, I was beginning to have a hard time putting on a smile. I was ready to try new things.
While still working at the Thai Cuisine I began to sideline as Thor’s grease monkey in the VW repair shop he’d opened west of downtown in a space that backed up onto an inlet of Cayuga Lake. It wasn’t an official job. I was mostly just hanging out and changing oil but also learning more complicated things if a teachable moment aligned with the opportunity to be useful. Sometimes I was just learning the names of tools to hand to Thor.
With the lower half of his jump suit sticking out from under a car he might say, “Hey will you pass me that torque wrench next to the compressor?”
Thor is a natural teacher. People like hanging out with him because beyond being a fun person, he’s likely to teach you something. Around this time he started a second job teaching car mechanics to high school students at a garage run by BOCES in Tompkins County.
He also introduced me to the MacDonald’s, an organic farming family I became very close to over the years.
(to be continued)
Spotty West Goes East 