My 16 year old daughter started her first job in the real world yesterday. I dropped her off and watched her walk through the dawn-lit, still empty parking lot to the small family-run cafe. Driving home I recalled my own first job at 16.
Nature’s Kitchen was a storefront Indian restaurant. It was just me and the cook, Singh – a gentle man with a young family back in India. He loved beer and the Average White Band. As soon as the last patron left, he cranked up a tape and we’d clean up to the blaring funky beat. No table cloths on the 15 or so tables, just yellow paper placemat with scalloped edges, one set at every place. I remember this detail because for years I kept a little love note on a torn-off piece of placemat from an admirer I liked back. He probably scrawled it while slurping his mulligitawny soup. There were crushes, celebrities and crazy people who came in regularly. The glove lady was most memorable. She wore elbow length gloves and came back into the kitchen to boss Singh around. She wouldn’t place her order with me and only allowed him to bring her dishes out – probably because she had crowed at him to wash his hands first. She always finished her meal with the Indian pudding — a scary looking cream-of-wheat concoction in a battered frying pan, kept warm but also drying out, at the back of the black stove. Thinking back, I’m surprised anything out of that kitchen met glove-lady’s clean neurosis.
Waitressing became my go-to job. It was easy to walk into a restaurant and get hired. Quick and cash, tips that back-in-the-day, did not get reported. I waitressed in restaurants, bars, country clubs and hotels for over ten years. My final job was at a fancy hotel chain as a unionized banquet waitress. I was relieved to no longer have to rattle off salad dressing choices or beers on tap. Sometimes I could go through the whole night only saying one word to the customers as I rounded each table with a heavy pot: “coffee?” Lifting the metal lids, balancing two plates on one arm, a the third in hand slid quietly in front of the diner, while at the next table, my colleagues did the same. It all felt so choreographed. Most nights, I enjoyed moving efficiently through the room in my little black polyester uniform with white ruffly apron, the night planned out – a beginning, middle and end around courses of a mass meal. Finally, worried I’d be doomed to this work for the rest of my life, I swore waitressing off and headed to Japan with the idea of learning how to make seiketei – Japanese rock gardens. But that’s another story.
I wonder how many of us finally land a way to make money that is really right for us? Something that gives us pleasure — or at least, does not defeat us body and soul? And for how long does it remain so? For now, I watch my daughters new pleasure at making bacon-egg sandwiches and coffee and hope she always finds a way.