Tag: waitress

Leaving on a Jet Plane

I’d like to say all my bags are packed and I’m ready to go. I’m not. That is what I will do today.

I used to love travel. I remember the excitement in getting ready for a big trip. And there were some very big trips in my life.

From my home base in Canada, I flew to Sri Lanka for a three month walking trek and sojourn through India and Nepal. On another occasion, I flew to Seoul Korea to connect with my family on tiny and dazzling beautiful black sand Jeju Island off South Korea’s coast.

Then there was the southern sojourn to Argentina to take a ten day horse trek across the Andes. And I once flew due North and landed in Iqaluit, Nunavut for several frost filled days to attend the Arctic Winter Games.

Many writers laud the benefits of travel. I do. It changes you. It broadens your perspective on so many things. It can shatter the illusion of cultural superiority that some secretly harbor if they have not travelled very far from their home base.

One look at a carved monument in almost any country should knock that out of your system pretty quickly. Not always, of course. But often.

Travel is a kind of education that you cannot replicate by reading books. Books stimulate the imagination. Travel stimulates the senses. Nothing could replace the overwhelming sights and sounds of a spice market in New Delhi, India.

Celebrating Holi, the festival of colors, is one of the most unique occasions I’ve ever taken part in. In under an hour, me and my traveling companions were physically drenched in a dozen colors from handfuls of special chalk thrown at us. Deliberately!

As you wander the streets of New Delhi (or anywhere in India on that unique, special holiday), everyone is equally streaked with multiple colors of dust.

Indians generally have a great sense of occasion. Nothing can match the style and splendor of an Indian wedding drenched in rich fabrics, brilliant colors and enticing smells.

When most of my college buddies were working at traditional summer jobs after the term was over, I spent every summer traveling on some pretense or another. Europe. First as a waitress in a massive tourist hotel and the following summer as a student. Then Egypt as a student after my third year.

After graduation, I spent several months traipsing through Asia. So many indelible memories. So much experience and learning – mostly good.

I am leaving my country again. This time, on a more permanent basis. We cannot predict the future with flawless accuracy but we can make some educated guesses.

For me that means the next few years will be spent among my continent mates directly to our South. Living in the USA at this juncture in history is an ongoing daily education. I won’t make a qualitative call on what I’m learning there.

Travel brings you home with new eyes. You see everything that was familiar and there before but differently somehow.

It is easy for me to appreciate the old song, “How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Pa-ree?” Travel was like an addiction where the more I did it, the more I craved. I deemed it a healthy addiction and only now see the cravings diminishing somewhat.

Hours from now, I’ll be winging my way South to rejoin my husband and put this country in the rearview mirror for awhile.

When the jet place departs, I fully expect my bags to be packed and ready to go.

As ready as I’ll ever be at any rate.

House Keeping

I am enticed by and enjoy fine TV British dramas such as Downton Abbey and the older, but venerable PBS stalwart, Upstairs, Downstairs.

Prominent in every cast of characters is the terse and tight-lipped housekeeper who reigns over the various house servants in her domain with an implacable and impeccable air of quiet authority. She perpetually carried a faint air of disapproval and danger. Cross her at your peril.

The skill of keeping a house used to be a marketable trade. Right up there with plumber and electrician and carpenter. Mind you, when English country manor houses were roughly the same square footage as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, considerable management skill was required.

Keeping an English manor house would have been the origin of the modern day skillset of project management and logistics. Admission to the hallowed halls of keeping a great house usually started with apprenticeship.

Emerging housekeepers started their careers at a young age starting out with ignominious job titles in ignominious jobs: scullery maid, house servant, kitchenmaid, chamber attendant, scullion.

You worked up to the post of housekeeper, if you ever did, and were not waylaid by marriage and babies. I can only imagine the degree of skullduggery and political finesse required to succeed in that post. Part military strategist and part politician. The rules of conduct and the standards were much higher and more inflexible than they are generally today.

But a young man or woman who “went into service” could comfortably rely on – if they obeyed the rules of conduct and consistently met the required standards – a “career for life.”

In a similar vein, I once met a bright and lively thirteen year old German girl aiming for a career as a waitress. I was her colleague for a summer in a massive German resort hotel in the middle of the Rhine River Valley’s wine country.

I was amazed that the German school system had young people choose and start planning for a lifelong career at such a tender age. It seemed to me that she was going to miss out on a lot of life adventures by tying herself into a career path.

My attitude, I now realize, was the perspective of an entitled young North American woman who was reaping the rich rewards of a generous post-feminist establishment. I was a young woman living through the age of affirmative action.

As society was test driving the radical notion that women could, indeed, perform tasks equal to their male counterparts, you saw the rise of courses like “powder puff” mechanics (in large bright pink lettering on every poster) aimed at teaching women to keep their car in top fit condition. Imagine.

What I came to realize was that I took for granted the career opportunities I had with seemingly boundless economic rewards that were specifically tied to the early 70s and the Zeitgeist of that particular juncture in history.

So when I hired young people recently to “deep clean” my house, I got a first hand look at how sad and low the general standards of housekeeping have fallen. Deep cleaning now may mean wiping down counters but not taking toothpicks into greasy nooks and crannies.

Fridge handles get wiped down but if the greasy residue remains, no one hauls out a Magic Eraser. I saw no one using hydrogen peroxide to bubble away food crud.

Houses need love as much, if not more, than other inanimate objects. Like your car. If you ignore these objects and cease giving them love (which is generally called “maintenance”), it doesn’t take long for a house to start complaining. And eventually, to start failing and then falling apart.

Having the required skills to identify problems in a house is training that usually only comes with experience. If your parents haven’t engaged you in the basics of how to fix a leaky drain or clean out air ducts, you are likely to bump into some unpleasantness when you first start managing your own house. The learning curve can be mighty steep and ruthless.

I sometimes feel I’ve had it all thrown at me in my “house keeping” journey. The foundation that cracked mid-winter and flooded the basement bedrooms. The toilet flapper that stuck in the up position and occasioned at $1500 water bill.

The ongoing battle with critters who feel completely entitled to settling into my lodgings. They burrow through walls and wires and appliances in their ceaseless quest to find a safe and happy home for their young’uns. Not unlike us, if I can see past my anger to admit that.

So I am not exactly advocating that “housekeeping” be brought back as a laudable ambition for young women today. But I am saying they should at least deliberately arm themselves with the skills to keep a house in top working condition.

There is no guarantee that Prince Charming is going to know what to do when a breaker blows. You had best make sure that you do.