Of all the jobs I'm equal parts glad I don't have but someone else does, at or near the top of the list is food service industry worker.
And not just because the hours are terrible, you're on your feet all the time, you have to deal with people at nearly their most needy and you have to absorb a tremendous amount of abuse as a result of the actions of someone else (sort of like being a parent).
No, I wouldn't want to work in the food service industry on the off chance I might have to seat ... me.
Or at least someone like me. Or, actually, not just me. Me and The Lovely Mrs. Smith. Because for two people who are so compatible in so many ways, when it comes to the act of being seated at a restaurant, we go from being Yin and Yang to being North and South Korea.
All of this is seated, literally, in the most fundamental, basic tenets of our respective characters. See, The Lovely Mrs. Smith is vivacious, charming, bubbly and loves people and noise and crowds and to see all the folks she knows.
And I ... don't.
OK, so, maybe that's a bit of a generalization. I like crowds the way people like going to the zoo. It's one thing to like observing the lions. It's quite another to want to go pet them.
So the fun starts when The Lovely Mrs. Smith and I dine out, and the host/hostess starts to seat us and receives a lifelong learner's worth of experience in the duality of the human spirit.
See, if it were up to me, I'd like a table in the back. Actually, past the back. On the patio. Of the restaurant next to the one we're at. That's closed. I'd also like to phone in my order and have it delivered by a drone, which I will tip generously. If that mattered to the drone.
The Lovely Mrs. Smith, on the other hand, would like a table in the middle of ... everything. With a view of ... everywhere. Surrounded by ... everyone. And she will talk to ... anyone.
I've often wondered if my beloved has missed her actual calling in life. It's possible she should have been a CIA interrogator. Instead of waterboarding anyone, she'd just start talking to them, and before you know it, they would have told her any and all secrets, and decided they actually wanted to get out of the terrorist game, move to the states and become landscape architects.
How persuasive is she? Well, when we met, I told her I wasn't going to get married until I was at least 30 and I'd only have one child, if that. I got married at 25 and I have four kids. And I still really have no idea how that happened.
So, to sum up the situation, I like to sit in the corner in the back and my wife likes to sit in the middle of the front. Which means that, in the spirit of mutual compromise, we sit in the middle of the front.
And we need a little bit of qualification here. When I say "sit," well, that's a little more fluid with us than it is with most folks. You see, when whomever it is whose job it is to seat you says, "Is this all right?", most people answer, "Yes."
For us, the answer is, "Well, it's a start."
It seems The Lovely Mrs. Smith tends to decide the grass is greener not on the other side of the fence, but on the other side of the table. Or maybe at the end. OK, not there -- unfortunate view into the kitchen. But not there -- back to the room. So, OK, I'll just sit where I started.
The moral of this story isn't that I just need to vent every now and then. I mean, let's face it: After 30-plus years of marriage, it's going to take a lot more than re-arranging the imaginary seating chart to upset me. What some people might consider a flaw, I've decided is actually a feature.
It is, however, that if my marriage can be considered successful (and stats would tend to bear out that it is), it may be, in large part, because of, and not in spite of, our differences.
For me, dining with The Lovely Mrs. Smith is re-education in the fact that you can, in fact, interact with people and that it doesn't have to be brunch at a silent retreat. For her, I don't know ... maybe someone to split dessert with?
As long as we get the Yin and Yang sundae. With extra nuts.
Commentary on 03/10/2017