A weekend recollection & then a remembrance of things past:

Dinner with Angela’s family at Frank Pappas… I’ll get to that – let’s go in backwards. This afternoon I went to a welcome home party for BJ’s brother-in-law Aaron. I was there the night Aaron met Brit at Ryan’s Sports bar, “Has anyone ever told you that you look like Meg Ryan?” Love at first line, sincerely given. I was in North Carolina in the Summer of 1999 when they were married. Aaron paid for his B.A. in Business Administration in part with money from the National Guard – which removed him from his life for a year to Europe to serve in Kosavo. Aaron has written a book about his experiences and wants me to read it, maybe edit it and help him take steps towards possible publication. I am deeply honored by his request and will happily help him go forward with this in any way that I am able.

One of Aaron’s friends helped me with an earlier blog – the forgotten drink from T.P.’s office is called a Baltimore Zoo and it is important to note that this beverage is only properly served in a mason jar. If you’re in the ville I challenge you to drink one this very week! T.P’s office warrants a moment here. The bar is currently owned by Paul, who must be pushing sixty by now. The former owner was a journalist for The Ville’s Daily Express. He was a wonderful man who was one of my regulars at Days Inn and at Ryan’s. He passed away before I left the ville and his wife went through the oddest of transformations. I’ll write about them in detail in a future blog when I can do them justice. Paul in his Kitchieness is perhaps a quicker study.

Paul is an Elvis impersonator. He gives bar top performances that are really a once in a lifetime treat, or they were ten years ago when he was in his prime (Though it’s always been Vegas Elvis leering at the ladies). God, I have lived so many different lives in that town, all the same places and yet separated as though each were the end run of a different set of possibilities. As Einstein thought with regard to an afterlife, time just replays over and over, and we live again and again, each time making slightly different choices into infinity.

Ok, let’s say that Paul is not a quick study, he certainly is a local personality in the same way that say Beetle Bob is here – Paul shows up in costume at fair events and hosts
classic car reunions and contests. He’s an embodied icon of the fifties: sequined jump suit, chest hair and chains. If you’re in the ville and you get a chance to catch Paul’s show, it’s worth seeing at least once, just to say you’ve seen it.

When Paul took over T.P’s Office, he learned a great deal about the bar business, as did Harry and Barb over at Ryan’s, from a woman named Ma Mary. Mary once told me a story about Paul to make me feel better. I had dropped the hand held bar phone into the bar sink filled with soapy water, shorting it out. “Paul did that once and he decided to dry it out in the microwave, nearly burned the place down!” Picture Elvis doing a hotfoot dance in front of a sparking microwave, a stream of expletives flowing from his mouth. Well, we all have those moments.

When I first started bartending at Ryan’s Ma Mary was ubiquitous. Her husband Terry and his brother Jim are still there daily I am sure. She was the ancient font of restaurant knowledge from which all wisdom came. She once told Barb, “You have to treat your employees right. You have to pay them fairly. Because if you don’t they’ll just take it from you.” For Barb, whose work life training had been in the printing business in Saint Joseph, this was the number one maxim for staff management. We got one free meal with every shift, regular raises, and a Christmas bonus check directly related to the success of the business.

While Mary was a mentor and a friend to Barb, she was much more than a mentor to Paul; she was a surrogate mother. Paul’s real mother was always characterized as hard woman. She’s like the women you expect to see in Vegas, long pink hard fingernails and short white hair, dangling earrings that involve chains and balls in various loud colors; a leopard print of some kind matched with a stole or a jacket with a white ruffle. She volunteers with the Red Cross and draws blood on the second floor of Baldwin Hall. Some would see that as a fitting image. It’s not apt if taken too harshly, in harder times a lanced wound heals fast of necessity, that’s how many of us were raised. Sometimes we need to bleed (and to know where hamburger comes from Jen). Paul’s real mother is a very blunt woman, but she’s compassionate too. When I had hypertension from the ten packs a day of second hand smoke that form the atmosphere of Ryan’s, she always asked about my health. She’d gone hypertensive herself in her early twenties, “Right after my first pregnancy.”

Mary had that same “toughness of necessity” that Paul’s mother has, but she was tempered, less reactive. Whenever Barb or Harry had a question about how to run things, Mary had the answer. Mary had run food service for the Marriott in Columbia for years, and as such she had “seen it all”. Or at least all there is to see when it comes to food and bar sales in the middle Midwest. As I search for a way to describe Ma Mary physically, the first thing that comes to mind is actually Mother Teresa – same height, same wizened features – just remove the habit – poof the sandy brown hair (a wig actually because of the Chemotherapy) – give her a cigarette and a 10 oz miller light in a frosted mug, and you’ve got Mary sitting on a green barstool at the end of the bar. She passed away among a culture of chain smokers who deny still the links between smoking and cancer. It’s a healthcare conspiracy.

Barb, Paul and many others were devastated by her passing, if we live on in those we’ve touched – every meal at Ryan’s – every drink at T.P.’s – every plate of eggs at The Uptown Café (which is still run by her children who squabbled bitterly over her estate) has something of her in it. Terry remarried, too soon after in some people’s minds, a wonderful woman that he met at work, Julie. Her daughter worked at Ryan’s and married (and then divorced) the doorman at Toons. Terry has a tattoo of a lepracon with his dukes up from his service time in the Pacific. He too went hypertensive some months after Mary’s death and I saw something that I’ve never seen before, his pressure got so high that he bled from his eyes.