For some reason, I couldn’t sleep past about 3:30 this morning. I had a great deal of thought running around in my head, so decided to listen to music. I was listening to many different bands, from several different genres. Yes, Genesis, 3 Doors Down, and so on. I have quite the eclectic collection on my iPod shuffle. As several of the artists came on, I was reminded of many of my former friends. I say former only because I have lost touch with them. A blanket of emotions overcame me in thinking about these friends and how they each touched me. None of these take away from my life today. For the most part, I love my life today. However, that life that I love is in part to the history that brought me to today.

Marybeth, Martie, Cindy, and a few others seem to have made the deepest impressions in the tracks of my brain. The tracks of my brain – the wondering of my mind…

Marybeth
We met when working together in a restaurant; I was a manager and she, a waitress. I was struggling as a manager, as it was certainly not my life calling. It was allowing me to get around the money needed to head back to school so I could get on with my life. I was working many hours each week, working my tail off each day – enough that I didn’t have much life outside of work. Marybeth (MB) came to my restaurant when I made the “confession” that I was dating another head waitress – completely against the rules. The other waitress moved to another store in our chain so I could continue my “career” untarnished. Marybeth was a head waitress at the other location and agreed to come to our store as a “trade” so that she could get more experience in a busier location. From early on, she and I got along very well. She and I started joking around from the first day, although our shifts didn’t often match. She was the head waitress for the 3 – 11 shift, and I managed mostly the night (11 – 7 AM) shift. This, of course, meant that she was still there when I came on site. We got to know each other much better when my management skills improved and I started working second shift with her. We were quite the team. She was a very strong waitress who could always make me laugh. She had such a warm personality and a killer smile. I was falling for her in ways that I wouldn’t know for quite a while.

With the exception of spurts of business during the weekday breakfast shift, these were the busiest and the most profitable shifts for the restaurant. Sundays were particular busy and on the rare occasion that I was managing and she was head waitress, we carried off the shifts with near perfection. While I don’t remember all of the details, I do know that we had that “wow, what a day” feeling at the end of it all. Success at a full shift was rare, but always with the two of us together. Later in life, those days helped me remember that adversity can be overcome, if only in short bursts.