This poem is a response to two prompts: one from Christine with this accompanying image and the other being the final prompt at Poetry Thursday, which was “open window.” They reminded me of jazz artist Chet Baker, whose story I first learned of through David Wilcox’s song, “Chet Baker’
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One of the things I admire most about Chef is his thriftiness: nothing goes to waste. Last Saturday our produce supplier left a case each of strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries – about $130 worth of fruit -- when all we had ordered were a couple of pints of each to use
Friday night was busy at the restaurant. I was at the fish station and Chef was on the grill, which are the two main sauté stations. We share eighteen burners, three ovens, and more sauté pans than I can count and, once dinner service gets into full swing, we keep
Lat night at the restaurant, I was the utility infielder, if you will, doing whatever prep projects I could find and then jumping in to help whoever was getting “in the weeds” as we say. A good deal of my time was spent shucking oysters since Gianni has a hard
The prompt from Poetry Thursday this week is to write a poem using the last line of a previous one. The line comes from this poem. Here is my offering: Peace, Milton
“To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness.” (Albert Einstein) ______________________________________ When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and
In the early eighties I was a hospital chaplain in Dallas, Texas. One of the patients I saw was a man from Odessa, Texas who had AIDS. He was the first person with AIDS I ever knew. His mother was the only person who came to visit him, though he
Many years ago when I was a youth minister, I began our regular Wednesday night gathering by asking the kids to write down the names of the ten people most important to them. Then I said, “’I don’t have time’ is just a euphemism for ‘I don’t care.
About an hour before dinner service last night, one of the servers walked through the kitchen and whispered, “The health inspector’s here.” We had no cause to panic because we keep a clean kitchen, things were where they were supposed to be and at the appropriate temperatures. We knew
Half of my day is spent getting ready for dinner. The prep list hangs from the ticket holder and I pull my Sharpie from my sleeve pocket to mark my progress: green beans, succotash, gnocchi, Swiss chard, cod, swordfish, halibut, butter sauces. There is a certain way to do things.
When I get to work, one of the first things I do is change into my white double-breasted chef’s jacket and don an apron to begin my prep work for the day. (I provide my own chef’s pants and shoes – and there are both made specifically for
the lie that is the conformity of the supermarket is unearthed in my garden; the tomatoes here have names: lemon boy, early girl, cherokee purple, green zebra, roma, sun sweet – and shapes, and colors, and tastes – oh, the deliciousness that bursts with my bite as I stand in the dirt