Lighting a Candle

Lighting a Candle

I’m not one to put too much significance in my dreams, but last night’s dream, at least the snatches that I remember now, felt different. I won’t tease out too many specifics, but I was playing basketball when T___________ showed up and asked if everything was okay. That was it.

I’ve never dreamt about T__________________ before and, in fact, haven’t thought about him in years since I no longer work for him. At the time, he was just a grumpy restaurant owner who put up with my antics and blatant disrespect because I was good at my job.

I’d been in the restaurant business for a long time and though I no longer thought of it as my career, I still had to pay rent and eat. And while I was trying to figure out what was next, I applied at his restaurant to be a server.

He ran a good restaurant. Things got done and management didn’t have too much authority because the systems he created made it so the duties weren’t just arbitrary. There was a list of things you had to do every shift and management couldn’t vary it much and thus couldn’t pawn stuff on the worker bees or take away work from the favorites. Because of the systems he created, everyone pulled their weight.

As someone who’d worked at every type of restaurant in every possible job, I appreciated not having to navigate my day-to-day interactions around what one manager wanted one day and a different manager wanted the next. I could just show up and do my work. Once I figured that out, I knew that as long as…