Quit yer greeting son…there’s tables to do.
Father’s Day then eh. My face was tripping me before I even got into work. It’s not like I don’t think about my late father everyday or miss him and his corny jokes and sage like advice, because I do. But Sunday was a harder day than most, and not just because it was father’s day and I had a restaurant full of happy families complete with fat dads and thin dads and moustachioed dads and a fair few miserable looking dads too. No, it wasn’t just that.
Having worked in the business all his life Dad knew what days like these – St Valentines, Mother’s Day, bank holidays, Christmas etc – were like. We would always talk about them before hand. The same conversation, “How many booked?”, “Table d’hôte?”, “Everybody working?” and so on before erupting into laughter at my up and coming hellish shift.
But I knew he missed it, I knew he wanted one more shift back in his whites, barking orders one minute and cracking jokes the next. I knew he wanted to feel the raw heat of the kitchen one more time, the sweat running down his brow as he put up plate after plate of perfection. I knew he wanted to feel the cold, frothy goodness of that first, and rarely the last, pint of beer after work. A beer is a beer but that first pint after 16 hours in the furnace is something else, or so he told me. “Didn’t touch the sides”, he’d say.
Dad always phoned the next day, “How’d it go?”, he’d ask. “Did they all show up?”, “Any whinging?”, “Poor chefs must have got it tough.” That last one was just to wind me up and I’d fall for it every time. I wouldn’t hear him laughing over my ranting until it was too late.
But there wont be a phone call today and as my eyes close over with tears I can still hear him telling me as I complain about this guy and that guy and the dude that put ketchup on his salmon, “Ach son, it’s not easy.” And then he’d tell me how many days it was to Christmas. Heh…
And all this was playing on my mind as I sat mute in the taxi avoiding the poor taxi driver’s attempt at conversation. But when you get to work to discover none of the cleaners have shown up you have to snap out of it fairly quickly and go get a mop.
As I dragged the mop round the restaurant floor with little or no conviction I laughed and said, “It’s not easy.” Dad would have got a kick out that story.
Heh…
