Tag: dailyprompt-1955

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Pastries

Working at a resort hotel in season can be a lucrative venture for a young person. Tips can be significant if you are smart and know how to cater to the guests. On the other hand, you are often catering to people with outsized opinions of who they are and what they deserve. And of course, some people are just plain cheap – you cater to their whims for an entire week and earn a ten-dollar tip. Navigating their wants and needs can be a stressful experience.

It’s one of the reasons why who your boss is is so important. The summer I worked at Poland Spring Hotel in Maine, my boss was a fantastic Maitre’d named Jerry Goughins. He made work life bearable with little things.

Treats

The huge main dining room had several smaller alcoves that could be closed off when not being used for special reservations. The least elegant of these was an informal staff lounge. If we had an opportunity for a break, we didn’t have to take it in the kitchen, and we were not allowed to leave the dining room. The break area was a place where we could breathe easily, while keeping an eye on the dining area.

Staff dining rooms, in my day, were rather inelegant and bare bones sort of places. The food was indifferent, and sometimes less popular items that had failed to attract the attention of the visitors. They were called the “zoo”, which gives you an idea of the atmosphere and the quality of service. Jerry knew this. With the connivance of one of the chefs, he would divert an extra tray of pastries or cheesecake into our little getaway.

We could slip away for a moment, unplug, have a treat. And for a moment, savor some of what the paying guests did.

Daily writing prompt
How do you know when it’s time to unplug? What do you do to make it happen?
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Virginia Woolf?

When I was younger, I was the dumpee more often than the dumper. Depending on your perspective, my girlfriends either had the sense or the strong desire to terminate relationships that “weren’t going anywhere.”
Looking back, I am both grateful and not the least ambivalent about that turn of events. Many of the women I was in relationships with had some of the same maturity issues I suffered from. Enduring relationships would have been abusive. Luckily, they had enough sense to know when to pull the plug on US.

So, despite many quashed relationships, I got the better part of the deal. I eventually wound up in therapy.
Was I such a bad deal as a boyfriend? I probably wasn’t a great deal. Going through therapy, I realized that through many of those relationships, I was at the emotional maturity level of a sixteen-year-old. After some grueling years, I started indexing my maturity level upward.

One of the things I learned in therapy was that you do not have to give up being young or having fun. You need to do those things responsibly and respectfully.

When to pull the pug? Well, the best I can say is that when you realize that time after time, you are the adult in the room, and your partner is behaving like they are sixteen, you have a strong indicator. A strange revelatory moment happened when I broke up with a girl named Susanne. I felt connected in sympathy to the women who had dumped me. I saw what they saw and realized that what I was doing was the best way out of an abusive relationship. It was like living in scenes from “Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf.”

As to how you do it? As Paul Simon suggested, “There must be fifty ways to leave your lover.”

Go ye forth and sin no more!

Daily writing prompt
How do you know when it’s time to unplug? What do you do to make it happen?
View all responses