
Sunday was like a dream. (I'm choosing to ignore the weather forecast, which is predicting snow for this Tuesday.) We had a nice, little lunch on the back porch, and then the boys played Frisbee while I puttered around the front flower bed, trimming old lavender stalks and digging around to find new strawberry plants.

Max suggested we have lemonade with our sandwiches. I told him it was a great idea, but we didn't have any lemonade. He looked over to the fruit bowl on the kitchen counter, then back at me.
"Well, you have a bunch of lemons."
This immediately induced a restaurant-flashback. I waited tables for many a year at various restaurants through my late teens-early twenties (and then some.) And I'm sure a bunch of you out there have, too. Did you ever run across that person? The customer that requests lemonade, and when you tell them it isn't available, they ask you, "Well, do you have lemons?" "Do you have sugar?" "Then you do have lemonade, don't you?!" This is such an annoyance, not just because they are asking you to go out of your way to make them a custom drink, but it's in the way they go about the questioning. Like they're tricking you into it....like you don't know how lemonade is made. Like you don't have about a million other things you need to be doing, and you have time to make a drink that isn't on the menu that will probably be really good, that the customer won't expect to be charged for at all. I mean, come on. It's just water, and lemon juice, and sugar. What's the big deal? Really industrious customers will order an ice water and ask for a bowl of extra lemons and a sugar caddy. Just make it up themselves. I actually have no problem with that. Go for it. Stick it to the man.

Well, I did make the lemonade for our lunch, and it only took a few minutes. It was also amazingly delicious and I had to thank Max for the suggestion. I haven't worked at a restaurant for a long time now, and it's strange to feel so completely happy to be finished with a certain phase of my life, and also deeply nostalgic for it at the same time. It was a great gig. Good money, entertaining co-workers, and when I went home at night, albeit reeking of the tilapia special, there was a wad of cash in my pocket and not an ounce of work to bring back with me. The slate was clean. Asleep before my head hit the pillow.
I was lucky to spend most of my waitressing career at a wonderful restaurant called The Wild Monkey, (I hate that it sounds like a strip club when it was actually a charming little bistro-type restaurant with a stupid name.) It's gone now. New owners, new menu, different name. I do miss the characters I met there, and the hustle and bustle, and the BBQ scallops. I don't really miss the customers that wanted their checks split to the tenth of a penny, or the morons who ordered soft shell crabs and screamed in horror when they saw their plate, "It's a whole crab???" they'd shudder. And I'd have to be nice, and apologetic, and accommodating. Taking the plate back to the kitchen, and getting yelled at by the cook for wasting a $28 dollar entree. And don't get me started on the side work.
I'm nothing but grateful today, really. Being able to stand where I am now and gaze back at where I used to be. Working for yourself has it's own challenges, to be sure. The lemonade is sweeter, but it's hard to sleep at night.