Blinded by the Light 21: Gap Year

Hi, I’m 65 years old and unlike many of my friends, I’m not thinking about retirement, not even close. Instead, I work two jobs, and for the first time in nearly two decades, I awaken every morning free from deep, haunting existential economic fears. I think this means that after 20 years of intense struggle and depression, I’ve returned to the bottom rungs of the Middle Class. This blog is an exercise in figuring out what that means.

A little more than a year has transpired since this series was extant. I can’t really resume it without an explanation, which is a nice thing about writing. To explain what happened you have to—or at least should—have a grasp of what you’re talking about, but in terms of why I stopped writing this blog, I really didn’t know. After some consideration of the past few months, I began to realize what happened. It’s a simple explanation with a complex backstory.

The simple explanation is I got tired. I think it’s not unreasonable that I’m always at least a little weary. I have worked six or seven days a week for most of my adult life. But what made the fatigue of late 2024 and most of 2025 so different is that it was accompanied by a bit of disillusionment. Fatigue + disillusionment is a potent combination, and it often results in an uncomfortable stasis.

I began feeling the fatigue early in 2024. I got a call from an editor buttering me up and asking me to do a story on a quick turnaround. I usually say yes to these requests if only for the adrenaline rush of meeting a deadline, but I couldn’t imagine mustering the energy to do the reporting in a short period of time and then write eloquently. So, I heaved a heavy sigh and said no. I am aware that once you say no to one editor, all—or at least many—of the editors I work with were going to stop calling. It’s how the universe works. I didn’t care. I needed a break. Since December 2021 when I took the job managing 67Gourmet, a cheese shop near Lincoln Center, my work life had become relentless. I often awoke at 6 or 6:30 to write whatever assignment was in my inbox—and there were usually several—then at 9:30 I raced off to the store to work from 10:30 to 7:30 then I returned home at 8:30 to sift emails, listen to the new releases and the like. A few months like that is grueling; imagine a few years. By early 2024, I was entering my third year in that mode, and I, I, just couldn’t anymore.

The store’s success had been fulfilling, but summer 2024, we hit a hard moment. The heatwave that followed Memorial Day and seemed to last for three months chased our toniest clientele out of town. Furthermore, our proximity to Central Park was no longer an asset, no one wanted to go picnicking on a humid 95-degree day with severe thunderstorms looming. We had our first year over year downturn and it was severe. The store’s owner got cranky and began making existential threats about the store’s future on a regular basis.

That’s when disillusionment really set in. I know I’m working my butt off because I have no choice, and I know that most 65-year-old journalists would happily trade places. But this long skein of 15 hour workdays didn’t seem to be getting me anywhere, especially since it wasn’t balanced by movies, cooking, biking, yoga classes and other restorative types of leisure. I began to feel as if I’d failed myself again. But there were stories to be written, and a store to run, so I soldiered on. What else could I do?

The stress got worse in the winter when a sudden vacancy in my apartment left me with double rent to pay for two months, and the usual first quarter blues at the store triggered the owner into laying off one of my three staffers and cutting back our schedule. Then one of my remaining two teammates fell ill and missed six weeks. At that point, it did feel as if I’d dug myself into an inescapable hole.

Crisis sometimes fosters clarity, and I began seeking the sensibilities I’d lost and assumed would come naturally to me. This project’s predecessor’s blog, Life on Aisle 2, was about seeking daylight. This blog is about what happens when that daylight is found. I had to focus on whether I’d really found daylight or was that an onrushing train approaching.

I needed time for such contemplation, so I did something few New Yorkers would do. I changed my commute, rather take the subway between my workstations (home is essentially a workplace with a bed and a kitchen), I began taking the bus. For one, I love New York City, and the view of the streets and neighborhoods celebrates that love better than views of the subway tunnels. My mind began to expand and see possibilities again.

I also began to see the present period as one of the vagaries in the pursuit of my goal. Meanwhile, I found a roommate, sales at the store resumed their upward trajectory, and I began to feel a lot less like a failure.

I typically hear that if you don’t feel doubt in your quest then you’re being insufficiently ambitious. I’m no stranger to ambition, but I’m no stranger to doubt either. Even less so, now.

I began writing this chronicle, first about surviving being downwardly mobile in middle age, then gingerly re-entering the middle class, because when I write it has a happy ending. I typically write about music, so that usually meant that the band was happy with their new recording and eager to go on tour or the reverse, they were happy with the new songs that they worked on and were chomping at the bit to get into the studio. Writing about my plight had become a way of believing that this situation would end well. That belief wavered for about a year. I think I have it back.

Martin Johnson is a freelance writer whose work on music, sports and culture has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Tidal, Bandcamp, Wine Enthusiast, Jazz Times, New York Times, Newsday, New York, Vogue, Rolling Stone, Huffington Post, The Root, Slate, The Atlantic, and numerous other publications and websites. He also blogs at Rotations, and he can be contacted at thejoyofcheese@gmail.com

The Upper West Side Remains a Dystopian Experience

Blinded by the Light 20: Thinning Skin

A generic NYC building with AMAZING stories within

Blinded by the Light 20: Thinning Skin

Hi, I’m 64 years old and unlike many of my friends, I’m not thinking about retirement, not even close. Instead, I work two jobs, and for the first time in nearly two decades, I awaken every morning free from deep, haunting existential economic fears. I think this means that after 20 years of intense struggle and depression, I’ve returned to the bottom rungs of the Middle Class. This blog is an exercise in figuring out what that means.

I don’t know if it’s like this for everyone, but for me those weeks and months in between getting my collegiate acceptance letter and charging off to school were one joyous blur. Yes, I still went to my job in the deli section of a grocery store, and yes, I finished my classwork and graduated high school, but I don’t remember any of it in the granular detail that I remember the stressful days of filling out college applications and the giddy anxiety of discussing my hopes.

There is one thing I do remember from those months in 1978, and I remember it in vivid detail. I was making my annual summer trip to Chicago, and it involved more than seeing friends and family. I had been accepted into both Northwestern and the University of Chicago before ultimately choosing to attend Columbia University. This trip offered a chance to reflect a little on what might have been. Those reflections were deepened by lunch with my Godmother, an accomplished educator who had attended both of elite Windy City institutions while accumulating her degrees. She had long been a hero of mine for the way she held forth at our kitchen table on matters of the day, Vietnam, Chicago politics, and Watergate. I think she was the one who introduced me to the term “Tricky Dick” in reference to Nixon. During my visit, she offered to buy me lunch. I thought this was some sort of confirmation of adulthood. We had burgers and beers (drinking age was only 18 back then), and as we were parting, she pulled me close, looked me in the eye, and told me that while I was about to learn a lot of great things in New York that there were two things I needed for success, “thick skin, poker face.” Then she laughed her usual laugh and repeated advice my Dad had already made about letting my white friends do the weed buys.

My Godmother retired in her 50s and spent the last quarter century of her life yacht racing in the Pacific Northwest. To me this reinforced the value of her advice though when I reached her age of retirement, I was working a minimum wage job at a grocery store and wondering what had gone wrong in my life. Recently, I’ve started to wonder if maybe, just maybe, I had allowed my skin to thicken a little too much. Perhaps I was putting up with too much BS.

These thoughts came racing to me a month ago when I was interviewed for a documentary film. The subject of the movie was about New Yorkers who lived in rent stabilized or rent controlled apartments and how below market rate rents had enabled their creative pastimes. I wasn’t a perfect fit for this thesis, but as I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’m not shy when it comes to talking about myself. She left her information with my crew at the store, and we arranged for a video chat the following week.

The interview got off to a shaky start when she referred to one of staffers as my boss (I get that sometimes, since my three staffers and white and I’m not, but I expected more due diligence from a researcher). Then she mentioned that she likes to come by the shop and sample our cheeses. I asked her which ones she buys regularly, and she said she never buys them and recoiled when I asked her how we were supposed to stay in business like that. Yet the conversation quickly regained its footing and before long I was regaling her with stories of living in a rent stable apartment in “the poet’s dormitory,” a legendary East Village building. My neighbors included legendary writers like Allen Ginsberg and punk rock pioneer and writer Richard Hell as well as less heralded but great poets and authors like John Godfrey, Greg Masters and Lorna Smedman, all of whom lived in rent control apartments. We talked for an hour.

Afterwards, I reiterated that I probably wasn’t the ideal fit for the thesis but some of the writers, I mentioned in the interview would be. Shall I reach out to them? Her response enraged me. She told me that she was interested but only if they lived in rent stable or rent controlled apartments.

I’ve known for a long time that a daily part of being Black (or female) is that you’re going to get your intelligence insulted often. In the late ‘60s, when I was growing up, both of my parents were the only African-Americans in their offices; some of my cooking skills stem from doing the prep for dinner while they had a martini to decompress and vent—and they liked their jobs, but still. The idea that I could invest as much time in her project as I did and not understand the thesis had me shaking my head. My skin wasn’t thick enough to absorb this, and maybe that was right. I decided not to recommend my former neighbors. Baseball rules, three strikes and you’re out. I’ve begun to apply this to other circumstances, and I’m feeling better about it. I don’t see myself retiring and yacht racing any time soon, but I am drinking less for medicinal purposes and that’s something.

Blinded by the Light 19: 40 Years!

Not the usual place to start a culinary career

Blinded by the Light 19: 40 Years!

How It Started

Like most people in the artisan cheese business, I stumbled on to it, but I wanted to be on the path that I was stumbling. It was summer of 1984, I had just begun writing professionally, but it seemed as if it might be a little while before my articles generated real income, so I needed some sort of side work. I had worked in the deli department of a grocery store when I was in high school in Dallas, and I’m from a family that cooks enthusiastically, so some sort of food work seemed like a logical choice. I saw an ad in the Village Voice for Bloomingdale’s Fresh Food department. It seemed like the right ticket. After a brief interview, I had a start date, July 17, 1984.

I was assigned to what was known as the pit, a four counter section that had prepared foods, gourmet cheeses (the word artisan hadn’t entered the lexicon back then) and cured meats. The prepared food was fairly obvious as were the cured meats (ham, turkey, salamis and this new Italian delicacy called Proscuitto). I quickly learned that the way you made a difference in the pit was knowing cheeses. I sampled everything and discussed it with my mentors. At the time I had no clue that you could make cheese from goat’s milk, but the fresh chevre from Interlaken NY, was tangy and light yet creamy in a seductive way. I thought it was Haagen Dazs vanilla without the sweetness. Basque sheep cheeses from France were buttery and subtly herbal. Many of my coworkers were also new to cheese and equally enraptured. We bought pocket guides to cheese and compared notes. After Bloomingdales, I landed at Petak’s, a small specialty food store on the Upper East Side, which was very, very ‘80s. In addition to the excitement of creating a new business; there was blow, lots and lots of blow. It was a positive experience, though, the steady stream of runners coming in from Central Park (the store was a block away from Engineers Gate) motivated me to get into fitness. I was one of those nerdy kids who yearned to be buff. The decade’s democratization of exercise enabled me to develop a healthy alternative to the inebriants at work. My day began breaking neatly into three segments: writing, fitness, and retail. In fact, it still does, though the fitness segments are shorter and less ambitious.

What Happened Then?

In the ‘90s, I began interviewing more often for full time journalism jobs. I had interviewed straight outta college in ’82 and was infamously told by the Times that my Ivy League degree notwithstanding, I wasn’t cut out for journalism because it required hard work. I wonder if that HR representative is alive to see the lazy, putrid reporting that passes for journalism today. I got some of the same BS in the ‘90s even though I had been working six days a week—and often seven—for years. An editor at the Cleveland Plain Dealer told me that my hard working experience “doesn’t count; it’s freelance.” I enjoyed some schadenfreude in recent years as former staffers discovered how hard it is the live article to article, but only a little. I rued the chance to build a better brand and network via a staff affiliation. Meanwhile, since a staff job loomed (or so I thought), I turned down opportunities to sell cheese in places as far flung as London and Florida.

By the late ‘90s, dotcom accounts provided the income to make me self sufficient for a few years. When that crashed, I went back to splitting my professional time between retail and journalism. The journalism continued to go well. I began writing about sports and movies, but neither beat proved sustainable. I get it that I was no Richard Brody on cinema, but I’ll go to my grave wondering why this article didn’t catapult me to greater heights in sportswriting. I didn’t just call a title; I called a dynasty, yet it was one of my last major sports assignments.

By the mid-2010s, I focused on building my network, but It was hard. Everyone in cheese was young and many were snotty. I plugged an importers cheese in this wonderful NY Times article only to have him tell me to take a minimum wage gig a year later when I was looking for job leads. Many of my colleagues in music journalism zealously guarded their turf too. I moved my retail action to craft beer only to find advancement was a labyrinth spiked with glass ceilings.

Yet This Has a Happy Ending, Right?

Yeah, kinda. Via a series of pop up cheese tastings I did in the 2000s, I wound up doing the cheese programs for several wine bars. A teammate at one of the wine bars went on to become a buyer for a prominent wine store. When said store wanted to open a cheese shop, she sent me an email. Her boss and I corresponded, and three meetings later, I was rolling up my sleeves to open a cheese shop. And now, the shop is somewhat successful, and I can envision much more success ahead.

Am I happy? Sorta. I do wonder why it had to be so hard. On the other hand, there’s the satisfaction of having been given a needle to thread and having sewn a fashionable suit. And I often recall something Sonny Rollins said 39 years ago when I first interviewed him. “The glory isn’t in grasping the ring; the glory is in reaching for it.”

40 years after I stumbled on to this path of a career split between journalism and retail specialty food, I wake up every morning and reach for it. I’m fine with that.

I didn’t sew this suit the folks who work for Jean Paul Gaultier did. I occasionally wore it to work on cheese counters

Blinded by the Light 18: The Heat

Blinded by the Light 18: The Heat

As summer settled in, most New Yorkers could talk about only one thing, and it wasn’t President Biden’s debate performance and his qualifications going forward, or at least, it wasn’t just that. Most New Yorkers were talking about the heat. The Summer of ’21 was hot; the Summer of ’22 was hotter, the Summer of ’23 was hotter still, and this summer seems to be driving people off the deep end.

I’m observing with measured sympathy. New Yorkers don’t like extreme weather. All winter I repeat a shtick when locals complain about 38 degree chill in February. I tell them that I was born in Chicago, and you know what we call 38 degree weather? Spring! I’m tempted to vary that routine and tell my neighbors that I went to high school in Dallas, and you know what we call 95 degree heat in the Lone Star State? Spring! I don’t because I fear pushback that the heat is why too many Texans support politicians like Governor Greg Abbott or Senator Ted Cruz.

Instead, I nod sympathetically and go on about my way, warmed but not defeated by the heat, and Texas has a lot to do with my tolerance. In August 2004, I went back to Dallas to help my father. My Mom was having knee replacement surgery, and my Dad was well, in his final descent (he died in February 2006). On the plane, I thought about Dallas a lot. I hated the bullying I endured there and when I left for college, I had resolved to return as little as possible. In 2004, things were different, I was beginning to think that I should make my peace with my feelings about Dallas and acclimate since as a freelance writer, I might be the sibling running to take care of the parents a lot in the coming years (I wasn’t, my sister, an academic administrator took on those tasks with admirably dogged devotion). Nevertheless, during my week there, I worked on acclimating to that environment. And yeah, it was typical Dallas in August, I was acclimating to days of 105 degrees or hotter.

I managed by slowing down just a little and quieting my mind. Both were techniques I learned from years of yoga practice. I often practiced yoga in popular classes where it got really, really steamy. I routinely laughed at people who thought I wasn’t getting a workout from the classes. I had to launder my mat frequently due to all the sweat it absorbed. When I first started practicing, I thought lots of yoga enthusiasts were thin because they were vegan. I quickly realized that it was the calories they burned in class.

All of this may explain why I don’t own an air conditioner at home. I learned from yoga and relearned from my visit to Dallas in 2004, to not be so attached to conventional levels of comfort. Nonattachment has many abstract benefits, but I’m finding it has immense usefulness now. Meanwhile, I eat less and lighter. I’ve traded my base outfit from leggings and hoodies to light sweat pants and lighter t-shirts. And I really don’t mind if I have a thin coat of sweat. Given the vagaries of the climate crisis, I suspect extreme weather, especially summers, is with us to stay.

Do I tell all this to my sweaty neighbors. No, I figure it’s something best learned on your own devices. I just tell them that I don’t mind a little sweat, and that I’m hoping to lose some weight this summer just by existing. Seems like the best approach to the situation.

Blinded by the Light 17: A Moment

Blinded by the Light 17: A Moment

It was a moment that might last a lifetime, but it happened suddenly.

It was Christmas Eve 2014, and unlike most Christmas Eves this one in retail was slow, very slow. I was working at a brand-new store, and aside from students and faculty members at the nearby universities, we hadn’t really established a constituency yet. The students had gone home, so the store was desolate. I was brimming with enthusiasm because I had taken over as craft beer buyer, which meant I’d sort of landed on my feet after a tumultuous autumn where I left one job as a cheese department manager for another as a consultant to a mini chain of fancy grocers. My mission at the mini chain was to upgrade their cheeses and develop a craft beer department. After 10 weeks the Chief Operating Officer sent me a mystifying letter telling me that the new products I’d brought in were great, that the staff was energized and that sales were trending upward. However, he added that as the store entered the busy season they needed to move in a different direction. Which in fact they did. In the following few years, the chain closed several stores and sold to a larger firm.

That shook me, yet a few weeks later, here I was at a brand-new store laying the groundwork for what would become New York City’s finest large scale craft beer retail program. But it was slow, very slow. My boss asked me if I could resume laying the groundwork after Christmas when business picked up, and for now take the day off.

Usually, a sudden day off would shake me as I needed every penny I could earn, but as I was settling into a new professional identity as a craft beer buyer, my freelance writing was picking up speed too. I was in the midst of writing five pieces in eight weeks for the Wall Street Journal, and I had just reconnected with an editor at another well-paying outlet. Sudden afternoon off? I made my way toward one of the city’s best craft beer bars. It was time to do some research.

I was crossing the street at Astor Place, reflexively glancing at the big cube sculpture that is a fixture in the plaza. Almost all hours of night and day, young people are enthusiastically rotating the sculpture on its axis, yet today no one was. The kids really had all gone home. Then I noticed the woman who was crossing the street the other way. She looked familiar.

She was.

She was an ex, a potential Ms. Right from about fifteen years before. We’d never really broken up; we’d just drifted apart. Age difference had become a problem. I was in my 40s, a difficult time career-wise that I’ll never remember fondly. She was in her twenties and enthusiastically getting her life in gear. For me, every disappointment, every job loss seemed to send me ever more inexorably into a downwardly mobile spiral. For her such chaos offered the upside of self-reinvention. I may have felt that way when I was her age, but I really didn’t relate. I was too shell shocked.

After we drifted apart, our paths crossed on occasion, say in Whole Foods or some such, and reuniting seemed on agenda, but she was adamantly put off my career situation; the cheese biz had no money, and journalism had no future.

As I glanced at a couple of tourists trying to rotate the cube, I eagerly told her of my entry into the craft beer world, which was about to boom in NYC. I had visions of a job with one of the new breweries and a bright future. She paused and gave me a long look. It was a look I knew well; I thought she was seeing possibility. She heard a train approaching the nearby subway station and bolted. We agreed to be in touch.

I arrived at the bar full of thoughts of our time together. We seemed like misfits who had found a match. She was a dreadlocked woman working in finance after a gig at a museum disappointed. She was considering grad school, but her real interests were in yoga and urban farming. She loved jazz, world music and foreign cinema.

Before meeting her, I had run away from another potential Ms. Right, who had told me that I needed to move to Brooklyn and learn how to be Black. Dreadlocked finance woman would never say something like that. This woman was like me interested in expanding the concept of Blackness. At Astor Place, she told me that she’d earned an MBA but forsook that path to do yoga teacher training instead. At the bar, when I looked at her Facebook page, I saw that she was part of an urban farming initiative.

Then I saw something else that was initially dismaying, a photo of her hand with an engagement ring on her finger.

I pivot really, really well. I once chatted with a professor at Julliard about teaching a jazz history class focused on jazz of the last half century. He countered with the idea that I should teach a class on pivoting as I was so good at it. His idea died when we couldn’t conceive of a curriculum.

It took me a few minutes, but I pivoted. I realized that she wasn’t looking ahead but looking back and savoring the sense of possibility that we’d had. I appreciated that. I savored the look as I dove into a new type of IPA that the bartender had recommended; he said it was hazier than the standard ones. I was impressed by the fruit forward qualities. Being broke all the time constricts your imagination and in seeing her look, I began to appreciate that I was so consumed by worries about my rent and my career that I no longer thought I could be meaningful to someone.

A few weeks ago, I looked at her Facebook page again. She had made the right decision. They were celebrating their 9^th anniversary and had a good-looking kid. Her husband ia a message therapist. I was kind of proud of her; she’d found another African American dedicated to expanding the definition of Blackness. Meanwhile, I had struggled. The craft beer business proved as inhospitable to African American advancement as the cheese business had been. I found myself stuck in a part time, minimum wage gig until I began to concoct my own consultancy. Just as I was about to launch, the owner of a wine shop offered me a cheese job and offered a professional wage. So, of course, I pivoted.

The job freed me of the financial anxieties that had depressed me for most of the last 20 years, but I anticipated that the internal shackles they’d brought on would not release quite as quickly and dramatically. Via my work on a cheese counter, I meet a lot of women that interest me and some give me a warm look indicating that they see possibility in me. For the first couple of years, I was still so habited to being down on myself that I would return their looks with appreciative but performative responses. There was still a prominent voice inside my head that doubted I was really worth their attention. Sometime this year, that voice began to quiet. Recently a customer and I fell into a wonderfully flirtatious exchange, which turned upfield, and we began exchanging looks where we saw possibility in each other. We held each other in our eyes as she promised to return soon and report on the cheeses she purchased. For the rest of the day, I smiled if only to myself. I had finally pivoted internally.

Blinded by the Light 16: The Long Walk

The walk along east 15th Street involves both new buildings and building that used to be new.

Blinded by the Light 16: The Long Walk

Hi, I’m 63 years old and unlike many of my friends, I’m not thinking about retirement, not even close. Instead, I work two jobs, and for the first time in nearly two decades, I awaken every morning free from deep, haunting existential economic fears. I think this means that after 20 years of intense struggle and depression, I’ve returned to the bottom rungs of the Middle Class. This blog is an exercise in figuring out what that means.

Almost every New Yorker has an area that isn’t homebase but familiar enough to feel like it. For me, it was the few blocks along 15^th Street that extend from Union Square toward 1^st Avenue. In the late ‘80s when I first moved to the East Village, those blocks were my way home from the subway. I’d walk past the luxury apartment towers that back then felt incongruous (now they feel like the norm), the private school, some doctor’s offices and into the lower-lying residential area that was my new home. Eventually, I began riding a bicycle to and fro, so those blocks receded into an almost sepia toned past.

Then four years ago, I took that walk again and it felt totally different. It was the early days of the COVID-19 lockdowns. I no longer lived in the East Village, having moved a year or so earlier to Brooklyn. And now, one of the doctor’s offices belonged to my doctor. She had closed her office to spare her staff the risk of infection, and she was doing testing. You signed up online for a time and lined up outside of her office. This initially felt admirable, until one evening in late March, when I felt feverish, a symptom of COVID.

My innards had been on red alert even before the lockdowns began. I worked at a grocery store, the very definition of a public facing job. I had already endured customers yelling at me, spitting on me and doing all the other things New Yorkers do when they can’t have every single desire fulfilled immediately and cheerfully. My roommate was astonished and consternated that I had kept the job, but I figured he’d be even more consternated if I couldn’t pay rent; writing assignments were hard to come by, and those that did were painfully late in payments.

As I walked, I passed a pub that was formerly a noted jazz club, and my mind drifted happily from the terror I felt inside to memories of extraordinary music I’d heard there, Hank Jones and Abbey Lincoln came to mind. Then it occurred to me, I was being far too timid about my fate, perhaps the cantankerous spirit of Lincoln was inspiring me). I was 59 (at the time), I had decades of experience as a journalist, I was a respected professional in the food biz with substantial knowledge in two fields, craft beer and artisan cheese. How the hell did I wind up in harm’s way like this?

I didn’t have to think too long about it. The thing was that I’m from the kind of middle class family that you were taught not to complain. We weren’t that kind of African American. My Dad went to the University of Chicago but didn’t get a job commensurate with education for 15 years. We were taught to channel our anger into energy and ambition. I might be stricken with a deadly disease; it might be time to acknowledge that this noble strategy didn’t always work. I also realized that by keeping my failures to myself, I had let them eat away at my self-esteem. It is true that I’m not the first Black man to suffer from racism, but I often felt that I hadn’t overcome those barriers as well as others. However, as I crossed Second Avenue and got in line outside the doctor’s office, I began thinking that I had it wrong, this isn’t the We Shall Overcome Olympics, and that I should talk about all the potential employers who looked me in the eye and said I wasn’t qualified because the job required hard work or that I was “so not the type.” I don’t think my peer group thinks that racism ended after Dr. King’s Washington Monument speech or Obama’s election, but it felt important to explain that while some people might have thought that a minimum wage job at a grocery store was a good fit for my Ivy League alumni ass, there were extenuating circumstances that needed to be brought to light.

The visit to the doctor was calming. She tested me (it was the first time in a long time that I’d had anything that far up my nose). Then we talked about my diet and about how her daughter was going to manage her collegiate visits (she’d been my doctor for 10 years at that point, I’d met her kids when she shopped for cheese with me. She said she didn’t think that I would test positive.

My boss at the grocery store who was on top of matters (he required masks a week before lockdowns began and distributed new ones with our weekly paychecks), put me on leave while I awaited my test results. My first afternoon off, an editor from many years ago reached out and asked if I could write an appreciation of Bill Withers for her at Huffington Post Black Voices. I happily accepted. Four hours later, the piece was live, and Huffpo tweeted links to it almost hourly. It was the polar opposite of Wall Street Journal, where my work hides from pubic view behind a paywall. My network began to swell.

Later that weekend, I got a call from my doctor. I had tested negative. That began a streak that continues today. I’ve tested negative 47 straight times. I still work in a public facing job, though it’s a far better one, I manage a small cheese shop. I still wear a mask on public transportation. Not only have I not suffered from COVID, but I’ve had only a stomach virus and a mild case of sniffles in four years.

Meanwhile, lots of people saw the Withers piece, and via my rapidly expanding Twitter network, I began receiving work from NPR, Bandcamp, TIDAL and Mic. At a time when most sixtysomething journalists were struggling to survive, my inbox was constantly overflowing.

A few weeks ago, I took that walk again. I was on my way to the doctor for a routine appointment. I no longer thought about the ‘80s. I thought a little bit about that night, and how in the aftermath of my realization, my self-esteem has improved, and it made all the success that followed feel less like a fluke and more like the proper result of a lot of really hard work.

Blinded by the Light 15: Belonging

I wore my medal to work one day after receiving it. Wallace and Gromit approved.

Blinded by the Light 15: Belonging

When I left the cheese business in 2014 to become a craft beer professional, it was the very definition of a bad breakup. I had spent 30 years in loyal, passionate service to the cause of making artisan cheese a part of New Yorkers culinary lives. I was proud of my work, and I was beginning to receive exceptional recognition for it via lengthy coverage in the New York Times and New York magazine. Yet, that summer, during my job search, I had been told by one industry leader whose products I plugged in the Times that I should take a minimum wage job and work my way up and a Brooklyn based store that was looking for someone to manage their new Manhattan location told me during what I presumed to be a job interview that they didn’t consider me as I was “so not the type.”

Eight years later when the ironic vagaries of the gig economy plunked me down, back in the cheese business, I was a little bit in denial. There were certainly applicable metaphors about returning to an abusive partner that I had to dance around. Early on, I told people that I worked for a wine emporium; my job just happened to be running the cheese shop that they opened. That bit of denial was reinforced when an industry professional took a look at my first month’s inventory and told me I should visit Murray’s Cheese and see what a real cheese shop looked like.

Acceptance issues are a cornerstone of my psyche. My siblings were born 12, 10 and 10 years before I hit the scene, so I was always trying to catch up. In the cheese world, I was of three African Americans that I worked with, and by the time I reached Bedford Cheese Shop in 2004, I was a generation older than most of my coworkers too. This never particularly bothered me; I excel at being a free-floating electron, but it felt unnecessary; amongst a cohort that desperately sought outsider status, I was the real thing, not a hipster imitation. When I was in the craft beer world, there were formal and informal networks of people of color and older workers too. I remain a little surprised that those bonds didn’t enable me to advance in the field, but unconscious bias is everywhere.

Signs of change in the cheese world began to arrive in early 2023. Bedford, which was under new management and ownership, began a monthly series called Monger Mondays, a networking event for cheesemongers, and unlike the early days of Bedford, and the crowd was often diverse. It felt like the world of cheese was growing up.

Then another remarkable occurrence happened in the autumn. I was inducted in the Guilde Internationale des Fromagers, kind of a Hall of Fame. The induction ceremony came with dinner at Daniel, one of the city’s top restaurants, where in addition to remarkable food, extraordinary wine flowed for hours,

While my coworkers and customers were impressed, I wasn’t sure what to make of the award. Then a few weeks later, when I went to the next Monger Monday gathering and entered the room, everyone stopped, stood and applauded.

I had always felt that my 30 years of experience, race and age, made me a weird outlier in the cheese business. In that moment, and ever since, I don’t feel so weird, so outlying or so old. It’s kind of nice. After all, I have so many other battles to wage, fitting in doesn’t need to be on the agenda.

Blinded by the Light 14: Is This It?

Cooking was part of the solution, movies were another part; movies about cooking more than doubled the solution.

Blinded by the Light 14: Is This It?

One of the things that I do in the first few months of every year is make a specific effort to reach out to friends that I’ve lost touch with. The economic vicissitudes both of New York City in particular and of the 21^st Century in general have scattered my pals, some to far flung destinations like Poland, Germany or Mexico, others to near flung spots like Hudson Valley, North Carolina or Maryland. Usually at some point in a recent catch up, they’ll gush “it’s great that you’re doing so well!!”

This always gives me pause. I do like the juncture I’ve reached professionally and financially, but I think there are bigger goals than just paying the rent comfortably. Their response makes me wonder if our economic choices have dwindled to drowning in financial uncertainty or not drowning, i.e. being in the water but with your head just above the line.

I mean, really, is this it? No one ever promised me a beach house, but in this metaphorical context isn’t that at least a reasonable ambition.

It’s more than a rhetorical question because I’ve begun to wear down. Starting in late 2014, I began to work seven days a week: four in retail, running the craft beer section for a fancy grocer, then three wholly devoted to journalism. In early 2020, my schedule was cut to three days a week in retail. At first, I pursued journalism four full days a week, then I cut Saturdays to half a day. Then after moving uptown in 2021, the combination of lower rent and a relentlessly booming journalism inbox led me to start taking Saturdays off altogether.

Those were the good ol’ days.

When I took my present job, my retail obligations doubled. OTOH, I went from successfully living paycheck to paycheck to actually having a small bit of savings. And even though the journalism inbox—against all odds—continued to boom, I managed to get good work done. For instance, I did this piece, by waking up at 6 a.m. three straight days to write then heading to retail at 10 for a full, stressful day, and returning at 8 to continue writing. Of course, that kind of pace isn’t sustainable for a 33-year-old, much less a 63-year-old, and after a couple of years, I felt the strain. My prose for publication wasn’t as crisp, the sentences and paragraphs lacked their usual rhythmic edge, and the insights were shallow. I realized that I didn’t have to say yes to every writing assignment, so I began saying no. I even turned down a bio assignment on a piano player that I’ve been following closely for the last 18 months. I’m not fond of recognizing my limitations, but sometimes those limitations don’t give me a choice.

I spent most of the winter stewing over the situation. I was haunted by the voices of so many potential employers who doubted my work ethic. Suddenly a solution presented itself. My boss was upset at the payroll margins in January and demanded cutbacks. Well, I like to lead by example so I decided that I’d take a couple of Fridays off while I could (sales were gradually increasing already). During the first week, with an extra day off, I took the afternoon off and went to a movie. There’s something that feels like cheating when you go to a movie and come out to daylight (well dusk, but still). I felt refreshed to a degree that I hadn’t felt in many months. The feeling reminded me of my life when I was 33; I worked six and a half days a week, and I devoted the first half of the split day to leisure (this was pre e-mail, so it was easier to ignore work). I won’t have an extra day off for long, but it made me realize that making a movie and a trip to the gym a routine occurrence might result in a better work/life balance.

If it does, then I really will feel like I’m doing so well.

Blinded by the Light 13: The Cop Who Loved Wayne Shorter

Great music, even as a backdrop for doing paperwork.

Blinded by the Light 13: The Cop Who Liked Wayne Shorter

In the 25 months that 67Gourmet has been open, I’ve had a lot of memorable encounters, one of the craziest didn’t involve a sale.

When Christine, my first co-pilot, left, her departure created many challenges, but the biggest one was behind the scenes. She did the paperwork, inputting invoices into the database, policing markups, and monitoring inventory levels. In her stead, I hired three people, none of whom struck me as a good fit for that task, so I took it on myself, but there was one hitch. I hate paperwork, so I put it off, procrastinating like a college student with a paper to write on a subject that they didn’t know well.

This was not a tenable solution.

I did payroll every two weeks, so I began designating that time for plowing through the invoices. I’d lock up every other Monday and hunker down. It didn’t take long to realize that the cramped space in the back was adding to the drudgery, and I had become fluent in Apple, so rather than sitting at iMac, I took to doing the paperwork on an iPad and sitting in the sales area. This gave me space to spread out the invoices by account. I diminished the drudgery more by dimming the lights and blasting jazz, usually classic Blue Note recordings from the ‘60s. And I rewarded myself by getting dinner afterward at my favorite upscale Chinese restaurant on the way home.

Customers sometimes waved as they passed the store, and every now and then, someone might ask to enter, ignoring the dimmed lights to make a purchase. These were bearable annoyances. One autumn night, a woman walked by and looked at me with shock on her face. I figured she was astonished to see a high-end cheese shop on the block. I was wrong.

A few minutes later, a cop knocked on the door.

Like most African American men, I’ve had a lot of adverse encounters with the police. On multiple occasions, I’ve had unstable men in blue put guns to my head while screaming nonsense. I was getting all kinds of flashbacks as I went to answer the door.

“Is this your store?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said as calmly as possible. My Godmother once told me before I set sail for the Ivy League that the two most important skills I could have as an adult were a poker face and thick skin. I was reminding myself of that advice at that moment.

The cop stood silently for what seemed like an eternity, and responded, “I thought so,” and he pointed toward the New York Times clip in the window with my photo. “Some Karen reported a break in here.”

I shrugged sensing a de-escalation. “Nope, just a manager catching up on paperwork,” I said motioning to table covered with invoices. He paused, heaved a sigh, and said, “well, I’m going to stay on the lookout for a ring of burglars that break into stores to do their paperwork.”

I chuckled. It was a good joke, but I really just wanted the encounter to end.

He took a step back, then said “by the way, is that Wayne Shorter?”

My poker face almost deserted me. I didn’t anticipate this turn of events.

“Uh yeah,” I said.

The cop looked me in the eye almost admiringly, “my wife LOVES his music, we played Native Dancer at our wedding.”

“Cool choice” I said my mix of emotions blunted what might have otherwise been enthusiasm. I don’t know if the cop wanted to discuss music, but I was still pretty wound up, and he looked that the morass of invoices on the table, and politely headed off.

I collected the invoices, resolving to come in early the next day to finish them, locked up and stopped for a margarita at the Mexican place up the block to calm myself before grabbing my Chinese food.

A few weeks later, a new hire offered to do the paperwork citing his experience at a former employer. I was all too happy to delegate the task. I figured, why press my luck?

Blinded by the Light 12: Cheesy Economics

The fantastic French butter we sell is a mere $2 cheaper at Amazon. The good stuff is sometimes expensive.

Blinded by the Light 12: Cheese Economics

Hi, I’m 63 years old and unlike many of my friends, I’m not thinking about retirement, not even close. Instead, I work two jobs, and for the first time in nearly two decades, I awaken every morning free of deep, haunting existential economic fears. I think this means that after 20 years of intense struggle and depression, I’ve returned to the bottom rungs of the Middle Class. This blog is an exercise in figuring out what that means.

It was a midwinter Monday night, and the store was winding down when a cheerful young woman came in. She perused the cases and arrived at the register with a big round of an amazing French butter and a triple crème, both from the great French cheesemaker Rodolphe Le Meunier. I was mostly on automatic pilot as it was the last hour of my Thursday-Monday retail work week, but my defenses rose when she asked me the price. Sticker shock took hold and she huffily returned the butter to the case, heaved a sigh and bought the triple crème. Before leaving, she said, “I don’t know how you’re going to make it like this.” I smiled performatively and told her that we were doing just fine.

On my way home, I looked up the prices of what she bought. The butter can be found for about $3 less a unit in Boston and $2 less online. Some retailers were selling it for as much as $5 more than our price. Overall, what struck me was the scarcity of the butter. It wasn’t available at oh say Whole Foods. You need to go to a specialty shop like mine where we buy in small quantities, which drives up the price. The triple crème was ever scarcer, and every online retailer was more expensive than our price.

Yet our chagrined customer isn’t exactly wrong. Artisan cheese (and butter) is expensive. There’s no way around it. It takes many pounds of milk from specially fed dairy animals to produce a rather small amount of cheese. In addition, the production of that cheese is very labor intensive and since there are no artisan cheesemakers in Manhattan, most of that cheese has to travel, further increasing the costs. Lastly at the retail level, cheese markups are more aggressive than routine grocery markups. Unlike paper towels, most artisan cheese needs daily care and expert introduction.

I often hear the expression “don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good,” but what I fear is going on here is that the good is the enemy of the superb. When artisan cheese became prominent in the American market 30-40 years ago. Its primary attraction was that it tasted so much better than the industrial cheese that had dominated our diets. And indeed, Cabot Cheddar, St. Andre and Caved Aged Gruyere and the like were a marked improvement over Velveeta. But as cheesemakers continued to make better and better cheeses, it seemed like the market got stuck at St. Andre (the triple crème from that Monday night is like St. Andre but waaaaaay better).

About 15 years ago, an acquaintance in the music biz opened a venue that would feature fine wine and music. He had a cheese case too, both for cheese plates and in case anyone wanted to take some fromage home. A mutual friend invited me to look at it. It was full of midlevel cheeses. I thought a place offering high caliber wines would want comparable cheeses. He simply cited the vendor and declined my offer to upgrade his cheese case. Later that year, I had a similar experience at a restaurant hangout near me even after I showed the proprietor that his vendor was charging him more than they did their retail customers.

The catch is that these midlevel cheeses cost substantially less than the high-end ones that I sell at my store and advocate for. But a little ambition goes a long way. In 2011, I did the cheese program for a new outlet of one of the city’s top wine bars. I didn’t hold back on quality, and the owners loved it. 13 years later, several of the cheeses I chose are still on the list and the ones that have been replaced are just as good.

Part of my pay in 2011 was a $300 bar tab, which I drank up in a few weeks. Then a coupla months after the place opened, I brought a sommelier there on a date hoping to get a little bit of a discount. Instead, the bar manager told me that I had another tab to spend. The owners were astonished at how well the cheese program was doing. It illustrates that it’s always a good idea to advocate for the highest caliber food.