Haight Street That Great Street (I Just Want to Say)

Image by Sebastià Giralt via Flickr

Lunch today with the Drunk Boyz, those USF patricians, something I used to do far more often when purse was full and liver was limber, able to bench press a quart of the pure Hippocrene and beg for more.

Yes, it's all slowed down, the socializing after work that gives sparkle to the workplace. What changes? Workplace friendship or merely tax law?

This was actually socializing before work in the sense that most of us aren't teaching or working otherwise to advance USF this summer season. That is, it is not something we are on payroll doing, though actually we can't NOT work on USF's behalf at play or rest. We learn and we plan. This joke is now officially at an end: We really do spend a lot of time getting ready for our fall classes, mistrusting repetition. Regurgitating old notes suggests a lack of attention, a surrender to ease. I worry myself with wanting to do better.

Anyway, today was a traditional lunch. We went back to Martin Macks, which burned down a year or two ago and which we had kind of abandoned because the illegal waitresses -- oh sweet Irish lasses about whose county origins we could always joke -- did not quite always get our kidding. But now the refurbished MM, though noisy as the inside of a bell, did have quite a pleasant new waitress/bartender, both curvy and willowy and *a patter*. Old gentlemen like old dogs like to be patted, at which point they growl in their sleep. Her white hands fluttered like birds, distributing attention among the ancients.

At some point a 3rd/4th/5th round of drinks was ordered, and this sweet miss said, "I've got that covered." Ah, that's what keeps us coming back, that courtesy in or cups that assumes we will live to drink another day.

Old friends, old stories and always something new. Did you know goats were grazing at USF this summer, tending the lawn?

BW was in attendance. We hadn't seen him in years -- literal years -- and it was good to see him, the gray in his sideburns and the halt in his step notwithstanding.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

That would be your "Ulysses" by Tennyson. What comes first, the drink or the poetry.
Sometimes I get confused.