Alone and Together, at the Bar

A young lady walked into a bar. Blew in, it seemed, with strands of hair escaping from her short pony tail and her jacket sliding down one shoulder. 

The seat next to me was open, and, as small as she was, it took her a while to get situated as she tried desperately not to disturb me with her large shoulder bag. I liked her for that, for all of it really -- her politeness, her adorable messiness. If she found the older man to her left at all creepy, she did not let on. 

I like this bar, a relatively cramped space in an otherwise spacious and popular restaurant. It reminds me of my old suburban haunt, where the bartenders know everybody and fill up your wine glass when you're not looking and have that sixth sense about when to chat and when to just go about their business while they pretend they're not listening. Everybody has a story, and I like to wonder what it is. The bartender knows, but would never tell. 

Like me, the young lady was from New York. An Ashkenazi Jew, like me. Odd that would come up, but it did. Messy, like me, and polite, as I like to think I am. Naturally, we discovered we knew some of the same people, Jewish geography in a bar in Chicago. She reminded me a little bit of my daughters, or maybe more than a little bit of a younger me, a bolder version though, treating herself to a nice dinner at a bar. 

She told me that she and her mother, when they get together, often go to help out at soup kitchens. She told me that, even at soup kitchens, there is a pecking order. A cool table, a wannabe table, and the ones who are content to be left alone. Everybody gravitates to a comfortable space. Like us, at this bar. 

My new young friend told me about her closet full of hideous bridesmaid dresses, how if her love life ever gets back on track she would make sure not to force her friends to buy dresses they could never possibly wear again. I imagined her closet, filled with lime green and lavender chiffon. I scrolled through my mental Rolodex, trying to locate some thirty-ish young man who might be worthy of this young lady, this young lady who reminds me of my daughters and the younger self I like to imagine I was. She'll be fine, though, either way.

We are all out there, I suppose, navigating a world that can seem daunting and unfamiliar, unrecognizable at times. A world where it seems the high road leads to nowhere and the line between truth and lies has become oddly blurred. But at the bar, the playing field is level -- no cool tables, no wannabe tables. We all sit in a row, in a comfortable space.