A Day in the Life part I

Five AM comes way too early especially considering that the warm body curled up next to me won't even think about stirring for another two hours, but routine is a powerful driver and I am awake in time to kill the alarm before it even goes off and fumble for my glasses on the nightstand like I've done every morning since I was eight years old, excepting a few ignominious occasions in college when I woke up with my contacts still in and glued to my corneas with the opacity of three-day-old fish eyes.



The coffeemaker burbles reasurringly as I grab a quick shower, and I manage to slug down half a cup while shaving and retrieving the holy trinity of wallet-watch-cellphone from the kitchen table. Careful pause to sort out my meds (thirty-seven years old ans I'm taking eight pills before I even start my day) and then it's out to the garage to gear up.



The sight of my bike gleaming black under the shoplights never fails to cheer me even well before a cold and rainy October dawn. It looks far better than an unrestored 1976 BMW has any right to -- immaculate paint, decent chrome, and that inscrutable look of having been both ridden hard and coddled in the same lifetime. As I work through the litany of zippers-- heavy cordura pants, Aerostich jacket, boots-- I think back on the brutal November commutes in Vermont with a bad charging system and no money to fix it so that I began each day before first light by bump-starting the bike down State Street hill in Montpelier... of riding through puddles my first year in Seattle that threatened to backflood the exhaust, of pushing the beast three miles through an ice storm last winter until I at last had to abandon ship in a motel parking lot off Aurora and walk the last twelve blocks home lugging my saddlebags and helmet like a pack mule.






Reflection aside, I chug the last half-cup of coffee and leave the mug on the workbench, open the garage door, and roll the bike fifty yards down the street before starting it so as not to wake the boys. The engine fires on a touch and with two quick rights and a left I am barreling down I-5 at a steady 70 in the pre-rush traffic.



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After ten years in the same hotel I can get a sense of what the day holds before I even enter the building. Rolling to a stop outside the soaring Palladian windows of the dining room as I wait for the light to change, I make a quick scan of the interior... how full does it look? How fast are the servers moving? Is the continental buffet set right? Are there tour busses double-stacked at the Seneca Street door? I take my next set of cues from the activity on A level, deep in the bowels of the ship. What does the overnight security guy have to say about his shift? How quickly are people hustling in the locker room? Is my graveyard cook still there at 6:45 changing out of his spattered whites and able to give me a rundown of the overnight business? And finally, the elevator.



From A level to the kitchen is a four-level ascent, and as the car rises so does the ambient volume of familiar sounds; the clatter of china and silver, the metal on metal of pans on a stovetop, the occasional punctuation of broken glass and the clamor of voices.



On a quiet morning, the doors slide open to a subdued undercurrent of sound and activity. My breakfast cook is poaching eggs two flats at a time and talking football with one of the night cleaners. The garde-manger ladies are slicing fruit, layering berries in parfait glasses, and drinking espresso laced with condensed milk from highball glasses. The servers are making a pretense at their sidework, polishing silver and glassware, filling sugar boats. These are the mornings when I take a perfuntory spin through the breakfast line and dining room, check that the oatmeal isn't lumpy and the berries aren't moldy, and then line my crew up for a quick preshift briefing before turning to my own hydra-headed workload of paperwork and projects.

That is the definition of a good morning.


More often than not however the elevator doors open to a scene more remeniscent of Guernica than Dejuner sur L'herbe. At 6:30 the breakfast line is already fifteen tickets deep and going down fast, the servers are screaming because there's no Devonshire cream or seven-grain bread, and the AM steward is chunking up watermelons into a five-gallon bucket to puree with a stick blender because the PM garde-manger forgot to make watermelon-mint juice AGAIN. I am scarcely two steps onto the floor before a banquet manager is assaulting me with the information that there were no bagels delivered for the two hundred people in the ballroom who will be flooding the buffet in fifteen minutes. When I finally make it into the kitchen itself, I discover that my overnight cook has turned ten gallons of pasteurized liquid egg product into a near-solid mass of sickly green curds meant to pass for scrambled. And this, inevitably, is the point when my lunch cook calls in sick, Room Service runs out of croissants, and I am informed that somebody lost the breakfast pre-order for the ambassador from France so his omlette is half an hour late.

And all I can wonder is what will happen AFTER 7:00 when things really get going?