Jeff Burkhart: Being alike isn’t always a good thing
It wasn’t midnight, and it wasn’t dreary. In fact, it was early on in the evening, it was a beautiful day and I felt quite invigorated. Maybe it was the coffee: a double espresso. On second thought, it was definitely the coffee.
The couple with kids was about my age, which is to say not yet old, but no longer young. They sat in the booth that faced the hill. And on that hillside, a family of crows had made its home.
The daughter in her late 20s pulled her hoodie down and sat in the farthest part of the booth. She didn’t have to say, “I don’t want to be seen with my family,” because her entire being radiated it. And her brother was no different. Two days’ worth of scruffy beard, a backwards baseball cap and a dismissive attitude, they were two sides of the same coin.
“A whiskey,” he said, even before his mother had sat down.
“Do you have any hot tea?” asked the daughter, also beating Mom to the seat.
“What kind would you like?” asked the server.
“What do you have?” asked the young woman.
“We have jasmine, mint, English breakfast, Earl Grey and chamomile.”
“What was that third one?” she asked.
“Third one?” said the server out loud, obviously trying to remember what tea she had said third.
“Mint?”
“No.”
“English breakfast?”
“No.”
“Earl Grey?”
“No.”
“Chamomile?”
“No.”
“Jasmine?”
“No.”
“That’s all the teas we have,” said the server.
“Can you repeat them again?” asked the young woman, without looking up from her device.
The parents looked at each other and then held up their menus slightly higher. If one were a guessing person, then that person might guess that they were hiding behind those menus.
“Look at the ravens,” said the son.
The family of birds misidentified taxonomically went about their business. The two larger birds hopped around, cawing and flapping their wings. When they found whatever it was they were looking for, they then hopped over to two slightly smaller birds and fed them.
“I have never seen full-grown birds get fed before,” said the daughter, distracted from both her order and her device.
Attention spans being what they are these days, the son filled in the ordering gap by asking what kind of bourbon was available.
“Here’s a list,” said the server, offering him one.
“Do you have Little Book?” he asked, not looking at the list.
“No.”
“Do you have Weller 12?”
“No.”
“Do you have Blanton’s Reserve?”
“No, but we do have all these,” she said, tapping the untouched menu.
It was now the server who looked around. When her eyes reached the bar, both bartenders ducked their heads down instinctively.
Sometimes in the service business it can feel like you’re on an island all by yourself. There are moments where you wonder, “Is it me? Or are these people nuts?” Now, I am not going to say it’s always them, because sometimes it isn’t. But on the other hand, sometimes it is.
A $30 whiskey was finally ordered.
“How much is that?” asked the father.
“$30,” replied the server.
“Nope. Get something else.”
Another whiskey was ordered and rejected by the father. And another. And another.
“Look she’s feeding the other one now,” said the daughter, perhaps because it interested her, and perhaps because it took attention away from her brother. The larger bird was indeed placing food into the beak of a bird almost its same size.
The father, who had wearied of saying no, finally accepted a $20 bourbon for his son.
“I thought they only did that with chicks,” said the mother, still listening to the tea choices being posited by her daughter.
The rest of the meal became an exercise in neediness and attention, each waxing and waning as the focus shifted. The only constant was the little family of birds hopping around outside.
“What are my options?” asked the son when he ordered his entrée.
“Options?” asked the server.
“Yes, what else can I get with it?”
“Besides what it comes with?” asked the server.
“Yes,” replied the son.
If you thought the drink order was laborious, the food order made it look like child’s play.
When the check finally came, the two children were already standing and on their phones. The father rooted around for his wallet as they headed for the door.
“I don’t understand why a full-grown bird would feed another full-grown bird?” asked the mother. “Especially when it is perfectly capable of feeding itself.”
Leaving me with these thoughts:
• A group of crows is called a murder, but a group of ravens is called an unkindness.
• Sometimes the obvious in others is less obvious in ourselves.
• Asking for what you want is always preferable to asking what is available.
• At what point does care become coddling? I’m guessing somewhere around $20 for a drink.
• “I do not suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it,” said Edgar Allan Poe.
Jeff Burkhart is the author of “Twenty Years Behind Bars: The Spirited Adventures of a Real Bartender, Vol. I and II,” the host of the Barfly Podcast on iTunes (as seen in the NY Times) and an award-winning bartender at a local restaurant. Follow him at jeffburkhart.net and contact him at jeffbarflyIJ@outlook.com