Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 18, Searching

a6b49-1kjdxktpyjbaxcm0mbraroa — This used to be my view of Manhattan as I walked to the store.

This blog parses the changes in my middle age and how I went from working as a columnist at a major daily newspaper and a leading cheesemonger to being a beer buyer at a fancy grocery store and how I maintain hope of finding happiness. It’s underpinned by an element of confusion fatigue, frustration fatigue and fatigue fatigue, but it’s about life and downward mobility in New York City 2018 and 2019, which is never dull.

In 1992, when I moved into my last East Village apartment on 12^th Street near Avenue A, moving was something like old hat. In 1988 I moved from NoLIta to 13^th and Avenue B, and in 1990, I moved from that spot to a nice coach house apartment on 14^th Street and Avenue A. Frequent moving was a ritual of young adulthood. Even though I had hoped to put down roots in my first two East Village haunts, it didn’t work out.

It did on 12^th Street, and that part of leaving it made it more daunting. The other daunting part was passing the interview. I’m good at charming and impressing strangers on the craft beer aisle of the store, and I was for decades on a cheese counter. But persuading someone that I’d be a good person to share their apartment with, was on a higher level. A much higher level. My fears spiked when I remembered how in 2016 in need of additional income, I poked around looking for bartending gigs at beer bars. I was seen as the hobbled overweight guy I’d become in my mid ‘50s, not the fit athletic dude of my late 30s. I felt my hobbled period was just a phase and the guy who routinely rode his bike over the Williamsburg Bridge in late 40s (I worked at Bedford Cheese Shop at the time) or the guy whose fitness regimen included two yoga class/spinning class doubleheaders when I was 51 was the real me.

I suspect that most of us have gaps between how we self-identify and how the world sees us. I wasn’t sure if I could narrow that gap—both in appearance and in the confidence that one projects from comfort within their skin–in the brief time between realizing that it was time to move and interviewing for new apartments. I had lost 25 pounds in the preceding months, but I wasn’t close to the fitness level I had at 51, at least not yet. Moving was something that would facilitate it. I decided that looks couldn’t be my ally. I would have to rely on what kind of roommate I’d be. It was simple, I wanted four things in my next space. A place to write, a place to sleep, time to cook and a place I could roll out my yoga mat. I wanted to argue that in going from a bigwig at Bedford Cheese Shop, where there were fewer than 20 employees to a team player at my current gig where there are more than 100 bode well in being able to contribute to a nurturing household culture.

“It’ll be a breeze,” said some of the same friends who counseled me originally that I was too old and out of touch to be someone’s roommate.

I cocked an inquisitive eyebrow.

You have such a large social network and an even larger network of friends, they reminded me.

This was true. My Facebook network had come to the rescue in 2014 when a six-month consulting gig suddenly ended after ten weeks; the gig ended abruptly on a Tuesday yet by the weekend I had my current gig. That would be my first stop. I posted my needs one Sunday morning around 10. By Noon, I had offers for a basement apartment of my own in Flushing, a floor of a Victorian house in Ditmas Park, and shares looming in Washington Heights, Carroll Gardens, and even one down the street from me on Avenue A. I went to retail at 2, fully confident that my relocation would go smoothly. The confidence grew during the shift when Lisa, my last cheese biz protégé texted me to tell me not to commit to anything until she talked to her friend in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. I had known Lisa for five years and I think that this was my first time experiencing an imperative sentence from her.

The places in Flushing, Washington Heights, PLG, and Ditmas Park were well within my price range. In fact, the Ditmas Park prospect was free, which seemed to good to be true, and it was. The Flushing place was nice, if a bit of a hike from Manhattan (it was in North Flushing, about a 15 minute walk from 7 stop at Main Street. I maintained it as a fall back. It took two weeks for me to see the place in PLG. During which time, I fell out of touch with the Washington Heights prospect, so I boarded the Q train one Sunday morning thinking that it was between it and walking in Flushing.

It was a cold December day and pouring rain to boot as I tumbled into the Union Square subway station to measure the commute en route to Prospect Lefferts Gardens. The trip was a breeze, the Q takes the concept of an express train seriously. I couldn’t imagine making it in the estimated 30 minutes yet 25 minutes after I hit the platform, I was opening my umbrella and walking toward Flatbush Avenue.

Despite the cold and the rain, a Boost Mobile store was blasting reggae and the fragrant aroma of jerk chicken emanated from two nearby restaurants. This certainly felt welcoming. I rang the bell for E5 assuming it was on the fifth floor, and I was pleasantly surprised to see Lisa’s friend and his shih tzu, awaiting me at the door across from hallway on the first floor.

He had emailed me the floor plan, so the nickel tour took only a few seconds. We slid comfortably into the interview. I’ve conducted enough journalism interviews to know that a good one is a conversation, and this quickly turned to that with only occasional touches on issues (my retail work schedule, my financial fitness, etc.). He described the amenities (laundry in the basement, better one on the corner, the location of the nearby supermarkets and that the Chinese take out place around the corner was really good).

Finally, about an hour into what I thought would be an hour interview, he asked about my previous roommate situations. I’ve had several, but I decided to dwell on hosting the actress and model Victoria Beltran for several months when she was 19 and I was 35. I figured that illustrated the age gap and my openness. Beltran is trans and I had talking points ready to discuss how much I admired her determination and ambition. I also thought that her comfort with a radical transition like that was a good guide for my late middle age transitions. As a teen, she handled hers with poise and aplomb that I could barely muster in my 30s. Small wonder that she’s in her early 40s and still on the runway.

I mentioned her name and Lisa’s friend brightened said “oh, cool,” with a shock of recognition and moved on to other topics before I could rattle off my talking points. A few minutes later, he mentioned that he too was trans, albeit in the other direction from Victoria. I guess he understood my reaction to Beltran. We were approaching the 90 minute mark and I started worrying about getting to the store in time for my shift. When he asked if I liked the place. I didn’t have to calculate much. My bedroom would be larger and have more natural light than my bedroom on 12^th Street. The place was bigger, way bigger, and my overhead would decrease by something in the range of $1300 a month. I worked hard to keep a poker face and said “sure.”

“Great!” He said. “When do you want to move in?”

We traded phone numbers and targeted January 15.

I walked back to Flatbush eager to grab some jerk chicken to go in celebration of my new neighborhood, but there were lines at each location. So, I compromised to some McDonald’s French Fries and nibbled on them as the Q zipped across the Manhattan Bridge back to the only borough I’d called home. This move was going to be something more than a rite of youth, but my friends were right. Finding a new place to live had been a breeze.

Martin Johnson is a freelance writer whose work on music, sports and cinema has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Newsday, New York, Vogue, Rolling Stone, 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.

20190315_133110 — This is my view of Manhattan now on the walk to the store, perhaps a touch more realistic.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 17, Leaving.

cda11-1cUSQ_FPvFxI4HD0-AFz_5w — I used to live in a neighborhood called “funky” now it’s just called Manhattan.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 17 Leaving

The decision to leave came easily; it probably took about 30 seconds. The implementation of that decision took years.

The decision to leave happened some time in 2016, and it came so clearly and bluntly that it might have been a moment of clarity. I had lived where I lived for a very long time, since 1992 to be precise. That evening in 2016, I was home from retail, enjoying dinner and beer while in front of the computer listening to a podcast and probably following social media, when I looked up and scanned my apartment. I looked at the walls covered in floor to ceiling shelving containing CDs, books and records. I looked at a pile of old magazines ranging from the New Yorker to Skin Two, sitting inertly in another corner. In the bedroom were two tables piled high with clutter, computer discs from an earlier era, clothing items that were never put away then fell out of the rotation. My rent had just escalated to a vertiginous level. The competitor in me wanted to use the increase as urgent motivation to rebuild the journalism career—yes against all odds, but the odds are I were never on good terms anyway—and make the new number work. Then the voice of reason intoned loudly inside my head.

“You don’t need all this,” she said.

It may have seemed like an odd moment for an existential epiphany. I was sitting at home in a place that increasingly felt like more like a burden or at best a refuge rather than a redemptive setting of refocusing and renewal, but I was in the throes of Double Dry Hopped India Pale Ales by local brewers like Grimm, Other Half and Finback. The fact that they were only making me feel less stressed but not actually happy plunged me down a rabbit hole of introspection.

I knew what I wanted my life to be about and I knew what I wanted to pursue, yet increasingly those goals were taking a back seat, if not something far more distant to the simple objective of keeping a roof over my head. In short, I had prioritized *where* I wanted to live over *how* I wanted to live. I don’t know if that’s always a mistake, but it felt like one this time.

I began loosely probing around about other areas in the city to live while a book proposal that had it yielded a deal might have alleviated the financial worries failed to ignite any interest in agent world. The results of my investigation weren’t promising. One-bedroom apartments in accessible areas of Brooklyn and Queens were nearly as expensive as my East Village digs. Some people even wondered aloud why I was looking to move when I had “such a good deal.”

That led to a year or so of wondering WTF was wrong with me. if pounding one’s self-esteem to a pulp was a useful skill, then I would be Oprah level rich. I’d have written many books on the subject, opened institutes and held numerous endowed professorships to teach young people the best techniques. It isn’t, so as my journalism income dwindled for what seemed like 23^rd time in the not so new millennium, I pounded in the solitude of my refuge, sometimes medicated with craft beer sometimes just staring into vistas of the Francis Wolff photographs on my wall wondering with amazement that my landlord hadn’t dragged me into court. I began checking my mail only once a week or so as I wasn’t always able to deal with the news that time was almost up.

I forestalled the inevitable with an additional gig–yes a third job–doing sales and marketing for a small dairy farm that was making absolutely killer cheese in the Finger Lakes region, but local cheese retailers were too slow to take the cheese into their inventories and the farm was slow to adapt to protocols of New York City cheesemongers. Meanwhile my self-esteem got a much-needed boost when a bartender I admire seemed to take a liking to me. I began deciding that how I looked in my eyes didn’t matter so much if I looked so divine in hers. Yet by the end of 2017, the cheese gig and the infatuation were over. Another book proposal failed to attract any interest from the agent community, and I had to face facts. It was over. My life as an East Village resident earning an income from work at a fancy grocery store and from freelance journalism—my badge of identity for the last 30 years–was no longer sustainable.

I waited all winter for court papers. I assumed all footsteps in the hallway were servers with court summons instead of neighbors. Then suddenly a reprieve lurked on the horizon. For the first time in a decade, an agent took on a book proposal of mine and gleefully envisioned a big deal. By the time court papers arrived, I had a way that could rectify the situation. All wasn’t lost. At least not yet.

While the odds and I are not on good terms because I’ve beaten them repeatedly; book proposals are where the law of averages snaps back into place. You might think that a writer with 35 years of experience and a wide range of branded expertise from published works at the high levels of journalism could get a book deal. If you did think that, you’re wrong. I’m zero for seven in that pursuit as my agent giddily began seeking deals. I began thinking what if this new proposal fails to entice editors. That has been my reality, right.

The thought crossed my mind that I would throw myself in front of a moving subway train leaving my computer on the platform open to a document that screamed in 72-point type, “Are You Happy Now Motherfucking Publishers, I was dead to you all along and now, I’m…” But while many, many writer friends would empathize, this didn’t appeal to me. I had other goals. I wanted to rebuild my yoga practice to a level that I could spend a useful hour a day on a mat. I wanted to bike the East River bridges more frequently. I wanted to attend the European jazz festivals. I wanted to drive the PCH along the California coast. And, I wanted someone else to look at me like the bartender did, preferably someone like her whose gaze I enthusiastically reciprocated.

So, I began thinking what sort of New York City life could exist from my income at the store and the vestiges of my income from journalism. The answer was simple, a share of a place either uptown or in the outer boroughs. Friends warned against this approach. I was in my late 50s; to their thinking I was too old to relate to younger people. Yet, most of coworkers at the store are two, three even (gasp) four decades my junior and I relate to them great. Most of my customers are two even three decades my junior, and we go out drinking. Most of my bartender pals are, well, you get the idea. I looked at Craig’s List. Shares in my price range were abundant.

Sometime between the eighth and ninth rejection letter (ultimately out of fifteen, it wasn’t a bad book idea, not at all, some publishers were wary of my brand and others had similar books in their pipeline), I decided that my time in a Manhattan One Bedroom apartment was over. Even if I got a deal, I was leaving. I would miss my frequent contact with my neighbors, both the next-door ones and the baristas at the coffee bar, the bartenders at the beer bars, and baseball fanatics at my pharmacy. And yes, I’d be charging off into a region of the unknown, but sometimes when the known doesn’t work, the unknown can be very promising. I figured it was worth checking out.

Martin Johnson is a freelance writer whose work on music, sports and culture has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Newsday, New York, Vogue, Rolling Stone, 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.

3d600-17T_ebWNZWt-KTmp86wkbGQ — Beers, yes, but also catalysts for existential inquiry

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 16, The Big Picture

From Sep 20, 2018

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like

Episode 16: The Big Picture

When I see unfamiliar customers on the beer aisle approach them with this introduction.

“Hey, how are you doing today? If you have any questions on our beers or ciders, please don’t hesitate to ask. I’ll be happy to address them. I’m one of the buyers here.”

There’s a lot to unpack in the salutation. For one, it tells them that they don’t have to stand and stare aimlessly at several hundred craft beers and wonder which one is right for them. Two, in a big picture way, it offers to make the experience of shopping far more convivial than say ordering online. That’s something that nearly all of my coworkers on the sales floor are aware of, and so the guy in the Yankee hat gets asked about his hopes for the Bomber’s playoff chances; the woman in the Duke sweatshirt gets asked about friends in Florence’s way, and so on. I like to tell people that I no longer follow the NFL passionately, but I do keep track professionally. That way if I see a guy in a Kansas City Chiefs jersey on a Sunday afternoon, I can offer a quick comment about their stunning new quarterback.

The response to my salutation on Aisle 2 varies based on gender. A few women shrug off the offer as if it were a come on or worse I’m implying that women don’t know much about beer (which is far from the truth. I learned some about beer from Mark, Dave and Ray, but even more from Gina, Jen and Maggie. A lot of my networking these days involves Lila, Colleen, Holly and Ally). Most women recognize that the conviviality in the offer is genuine and a discussion often ensues about craft beer. On the other hand, many men curtly refuse the offer. It’s as if there’s this notion that their Y chromosome also comes with cicerone skills, when in fact I’m certain that the city’s leading cicerone, Anne Beccera (ahem, have you lost that stereotype yet about craft beer being a boy’s game yet?), would happily tell you that the beer scene is so fast changing that you HAVE to ask questions to keep up. A discussion ensues with some men, and a few hear the last part of the salutation and ask, “wow, what a cool job, what do you do?”

That’s a long answer. The short of it is simple. I meet with sales reps and place orders and email breweries and reps from boutique distributors and place orders. Piece of cake, right? Wrong, the hard part is knowing what to order. I run one of the best retail craft beer programs in the city. People come from New Jersey, Pennsylvania and even Texas to shop here (okay the Texan is an airplane pilot and she shops only when she has overnight stay after a local landing but still). I keep my ear to the ground to stay on top of the latest developments. That means spending at least a half hour a day on Instagram looking at brewery’s pages and those from likeminded retailers. That means strategic bar hopping so that I can talk to buyers and managers of high-end craft beer bars in the vicinity, see what’s on their list and even peruse the kegs that are next. And yes, it means drinking probably eight to ten beers a week purely for research; dozens of bartenders in this neighborhood have fielded a request from me for a sample pour of something I’m considering ordering when its available in cans.

It’s a lot of work, and no, I’m not complaining in the least. It’s a really cool job, and I feel fortunate to have such a stimulating situation. Yet, I work 30–35 hours a week. There are no paid vacations. All that bar hopping is not on some company credit card. And, if I don’t match my paycheck from the store with comparable writing income, then I can’t pay all of my bills. So yes, I work another 30–40 hours a week either generating prose or researching outlets who might pay me for the prose I generate. There are fewer and fewer of those, which means that I spend more time looking for writing work than I do writing. And that means that the research part of the beer gig often takes on a medicinal angle.

Yes, it’s upwards of 70 hours a week of stuff I love to do, and I’m the son of two workaholics and younger brother of two others. I can handle this load. Still, there’s something profoundly negative that occurs from this situation. I lose the big picture sometimes. In NFL parlance, I become focused obsessively on first downs and forget about touchdowns. I have tended make the goal working 70 hours a week and getting the bills paid rather than working fewer hours a week, travelling some, going to yoga more often (or even more ambitiously resuming dance classes!), reading more, etc. In other words, I have made being solvent the goal rather than being happy.

I don’t think of it as a moral failing. It’s only natural that when you work so hard to survive, you forget that the object of this here game of life is to thrive. I had lost track of that goal, but it came back to me in an unexpected way recently. I was having a day where I was weary, not really 100% either though not truly under the weather, and I was looking ahead to several more hours of retail work. A regular customer came by to get some coffee and asked how I was doing. I heaved a sigh and said, “just hanging in there I guess.”

He smiled as he drew a cup and said, “well that’s the best we can do.”

My inner voice scoffed, and I said to myself “maybe that the best you can do, buddy, but I want to be doing well, doing…” and suddenly the inner copy editor and fact checker in me cut off that line of thought and offered a nice skeptical “really?”

I felt myself falling down a rabbit hole of introspection, which is not a good headspace for a retail sales floor, so I went downstairs to the stock room, ostensibly to paw around the milk crates of loose bottles to complete some six packs that had been reduced to five items. It was a good, mindless activity while I thought things through, and since I don’t speak Arabic, French or Spanish fluently enough to converse with the my coworkers based in the stockroom, I would likely be left to my own devices.

I thought about a longtime friend who lives in NYC. He recently told me he was going to hold his 60th birthday party in New Orleans and that I should make my flight reservations early since it would be around the time of the Jazz and Heritage Festival. I had to stymie the urge to yell at him; it felt like just the sort of thing that someone in the job bubble would say to shame someone trapped in the gig economy. I took for granted I would have to save my pennies diligently just to go to Eleven Madison Park or a comparable venue to celebrate his birthday. A plane trip, a stay in New Orleans? Are you freakin’ kidding me!

But, but…wouldn’t it be a blast to go to New Orleans? While the request bordered on tone deaf to my situation, if my finances can’t handle a trip for a friend’s birthday, isn’t there something wrong with my finances? Can’t I fix that? I began to wonder if my friend’s invitation wasn’t a vote of confidence that I could get out of this hole.

I decided that merely getting up to date on the bills, while an admirable goal, wasn’t setting the bar high enough. I needed a definition of fun that was more ambitious than enjoying new double IPA at a favorite neighborhood craft beer bar or an hour on a yoga mat. I needed a weekly dose of that while maybe saving money for a trip or too.

Otherwise, my customer was right. Just hanging in there *is* the best I can do.

I found a few bottles that would complete some six packs, restacked the milk crates, and I returned to the sales floor. En route, I decided that instead of grabbing take out on the way home, I’d pick up a salmon fillet, dust in a spicy rub and grill it. It would be a little dose of life. I tend to work hard so that I can work harder, and having a cool job makes that easier on the spirit. Instead, I needed to work hard so I can play hard, even if playing hard might require a little practice.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 15 Friday Night Lights

Episode 15

I’m not a cheesemonger anymore, but I still know where to go.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like

Episode 15: Friday Night Lights

If the fact that I have usually worked seven days a week for the last 46 months wasn’t sufficient proof that I’m an Olympic caliber workaholic, then here’s more proof: Friday, my longest workday, tends to be my favorite day of the week. The writing part of the day starts early; I try to be in front of the computer by eight as the onslaught of press releases is ferocious; even though I consider myself to be a semi-retired music journalist, I get about 50 or so PR emails an hour on Fridays. I try to respond to more of them than I used to because I don’t write as often as I used to, so I secure my spot in the loop by being communicative. It also gives the PR person something to take back to their clients. I’ve done some press releases, so I know how useful it is to take tidings back to the client. But the real fun is in retail even though the day might go deep into the night.

Unlike 99.9% of all retail staff employees, I don’t have a real schedule. I breeze in around 2 four days a week and I leave…well, that’s complicated. I leave when the beer aisle is set for the night. On Sundays, that usually means around 8:30 or 9; Mondays and Wednesdays that usually means 10. My Friday workdays end around 10 sometimes; around 11 sometimes and once or twice they’ve gone til midnight. The reason is simple I don’t want to put the night managers in position of having to work on the beer aisle (in other words, I don’t want some snotty trust fund kid bitching them out because there’s no Lagunitas IPA, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale or another craft beer staple on the shelf). To me, it’s my part of the exchange; I run a beer boutique in the middle of a fancy grocery store. It’s a culture clash but thanks to my efforts, it works.

Still, it is a grueling day and I usually awaken on Saturday morning dazed and confused. If it wasn’t for the reggae show on WKCR playing on my bedroom radio, I often wouldn’t know what day it was. But the rigor of Friday is lugging cases of beer around; the fun is dealing with the customers, who are chill because Friday means something different to them than it does to me. Typically, there are two rushes on Friday. The first is from 5:30 to 7:30 and as you might expect It’s mostly a beer savvy crowd in to get treats for the weekend. It’s genuinely fun to chat with them about new trends in craft beer (for instance, old school West Coast IPAs are on the rebound after two or three years of being overrun by big, sweet juicy New England style ales).

Then from 7:30 to 9 I restock the shelf and function as a back-end floor supervisor chatting with the clientele. The topics range from the red-hot Red Sox to the Mueller investigation while showing them where we’re hiding tahini or popcorn kernels. By this time, I’m sufficiently tired that I enact my own zero tolerance policy for nonsense. That might mean curtly shutting down the woman who tries to explain to me what a soft drink was or the guy who moaned that Aretha Franklin was dead and tried to tell me who she was. I told the guy that I had fond memories of growing up with her versions of “Spanish Harlem” or “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

The second beer rush typically starts around nine, and it dotes in extremes. On the one hand, there are the young men and women loading up on Bud Light and hard seltzer; on the other hand, are the junior beer geeks, many just old enough to legally drink who want to learn what overtones a Mouteka hop imparts on a beer (or some other entry level cicerone question like the difference between a pilsner and a lager). If they are with friends, then sometimes I’ll take them to our Pop Up area and let them sample a beer to illustrate my point. Some nights that rush ends around 10 or 10:30 sometimes it goes longer.

My coworkers admire my conviviality and they get that some of it — occasionally all of it — is performative. It’s how I channel my rage and frustration. I feel like I spent 30 years piling up good numbers on the left side of the equals sign only to end up getting a lump of coal on the right. At some level, dealing with the store’s clientele renews my hope as I pile up goodies on the left side of the equation again. Many of my coworkers have followed suit and the handful of African American coworkers subtly indicate they grasp the root of my conviviality.

One of them a young woman who started a year ago as a cashier shares the root. At a glance she embodies a stereotype, 30ish, overweight, mother of three kids from different guys. Yet look a little more closely and you get the consistent charm, hard work and eagerness to take on responsibility. In other words, although her resume may not boast it, if she’s on your team your team stands a better chance of winning.

She was promoted to a front-end supervisory post where she assists people who need help with the self-checkout stations. On a recent Friday, I was heading to the stockroom to get more beer for the shelves when I saw a scene. There were four customers, two men, two women, finishing at the self-checkout station and the comradery was thick. I imagined that they had just gone to dinner and were buying some mixers or some such to finish the evening with drinks at a nearby apartment. 15 or 20 years I might have been one of those four. Now, Friday means a long night followed by take out and a podcast (usually Still Processing or as I think of it: the Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris show). I’m fine with it. I didn’t so much fall, as I climbed up two steep precipices — one named journalism and the other named artisanal cheese — only to have both mountains crumble underneath me as I was about to reach the top. I’m climbing a new hill, this one named craft beer. I might regain my previous economic stature, but if I don’t, I tried. I’m fine with that. But I looked at my coworker and she was shell shocked. I could see she was being reminded that she hadn’t been given a chance to climb as an adult; she feared she might be developing skills for naught.

I think she’s going to get her chance, and it’s not because I’ve read the Sapphire novel, Push; I still believe in the power of determination. I wanted to go up to her and say something, but I didn’t know what words to use. It was after 11, more than 15 hours after my workday began. My fatigue had reduced my genuine — i.e. not performative — expressions to a handful of salutations and an order for takeout on my way home. I stood across the store watching her process. After about a minute, she clapped her hands and went to straighten up some shopping bags. I continued downstairs to get my last batch of beer. It seemed that she had channeled her frustration into motivation. I learned that my zeal for work takes too much of a toll me at times. It was something I’d have to work on, so to speak.

Once I’m up and running on Saturday, I usually go shopping

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 14 My Body Myself

Episode 14

When I worked on Columbus Avenue, I took the cheesemongers and some of the other cool staffers out drinking once a month or so. For one, it seemed like a tradition. When I worked at Bedford Cheese Shop (2004–2011), the lure of every staff meeting was a chance to spend the rest of the evening drinking on the store credit card afterward. For another, it was my way of thanking the crew. The cheesemongers that worked with me during my tenure (2011 to 2014) on Columbus Avenue were amazing; today the alumni of that counter include several restaurant managers, a sommelier, a chocolatier, a literary agent, a food photojournalist, a wine bar owner, and yes, two or three women who are still in the cheese biz (like other fields, the brain drain in artisan cheese is real and potentially dire). I loved my crew; I used to daydream of going around to other leading cheese counters and challenging them to a Cheesemonger Invitational style battle (and yes I occasionally envisioned West Side Story style choreography but with dancer/cheesemongers holding cheese wires and two handled knives). I also took them drinking to thank them for putting up with the cesspool of mismanagement, sexual harassment and general idiocy that took place elsewhere in the store.

I did my best to make sure that the usual foolishness didn’t infringe on the cheese counter, but I was limited. For one, I can’t intercept lewd emails sent to my staffers by their coworkers (the owner’s response was “well she is kinda flirty, don’t you think?”) or defend my coworkers against physical attacks — no exaggeration — when I’m not there. And for another, the job did a number on my physical well-being. I rapidly discovered that working 45 or 50 or even 55 hours a week on my feet wasn’t so easy now that I was into my 50s. I know, I know; I should have realized that going in, but when I was 42 it wasn’t uncommon for me to work a 5–4 shift at Butterfield Market as part of subbing for vacationing countermen, then charge off to Jones Beach to review a concert for Newsday, then work another 5–4 shift, and after the second shift, instead of collapsing, I’d take a led ashtanga yoga class at my gym. Then, I’d collapse for the night and wake up at 3:30 a.m. to bike to the store again.

See, I have unreasonable expectations for my body and until I hit my 50s, or rather my 50s hit me, my body had a track record of rising to the occasion. It was important as metaphor; my body could exceed the societal expectations and so could my career! Not on Columbus Avenue. I suffered through a cascading series of lower body injuries that usually forced me to use a cane to get around. I abandoned the subway for buses because going down steps was just too hard. The fact that it took me five minutes instead of 30 seconds to exit my building from my third-floor apartment was a constant source of depression. One neighbor happily chirped at me one day as I hobbled about, “why don’t you get a wheelchair?”

The doctors told me, stop working on my feet so much. I tried. I appointed myself publicity director and got the place coverage in the Times and New York magazine. The owner’s response was to cut my pay by 40% (not for nothing did the crew often talk over drinks about how the place was really a money laundering outfit), so I cut my hours proportionately and began reaching out to editors more and looking for other culinary work. That helped, but vestiges of that workload continued to haunt me well into my first year at my current gig, where I work 30 hours a week, not all of them on my feet. Fortunately, my employers were comfortable letting me hobble around the store until I healed.

And I did, by the summer of 2015, when I went to Chicago to cover the jazz festival, I no longer dreaded waking up in the morning to see what limb or joint didn’t work properly. Instead, I high stepped through the Windy City, racing up and down the steps of the el as my struggles were a distant memory. Upon my return I set about somewhat fitfully to regain my fitness level. To me, I was still that guy who biked a lot and took ashtanga yoga three times a week. Sure, I was older, a little more injury prone and fatter, but to me those conditions were temporary.

To my substantial dismay, many of my new friends and business contacts thought that the overweight guy on a cane was the real me. When I went looking for bartending shifts to supplement my retail income since journalism continued to decline, my contacts told me in so many words that I wasn’t qualified since they needed someone who could move.

That lit a wildfire inside of me. Just as I got fit in my 30s with a stern eye toward eradicating my self- image as an awkward teenage geek, I had a new image to demolish. However, I had to take a slightly different approach. Instead of engaging in fitness as a series of inbox initiatives for my body to accomplish. I had to approach this new spate of fitness as a collaborative effort, understanding that sometimes my body wasn’t up to a spinning class or even a 25-minute session of home yoga, and I’d have to take more days off than before. Instead of a “look” my goal became a level of harmony between my mind and body. However, I took to moving around the store as fast as I could. It was silly, but I thought of it as a rebuttal to all those colleagues who thought I was a poor candidate for bartending shifts because I couldn’t move.

One my motives in switching from jeans 100% to yoga pants about half the time was that I would start taking yoga breaks since my gym was a half block away and I know when the yoga room is free for self- practice. But who was I kidding? The beer program and the store demand far too much of my time — it’s a full-time job squeezed into part time hours — to simply break away for 30 minutes of sun salutations even if my body would benefit.

Nevertheless, I think I’m in the process of killing that old image. One afternoon a new fishmonger remarked on my yoga pants and asked me if I taught yoga somewhere. I told I just practiced, and I self- deprecatingly patted my still a little too large for comfort midsection. He understood my gesture and said that I walked with attention to alignment kind of like a dancer and suggested I consider it since it was probably better paying than retail. I smiled at the compliment, happy that I was perhaps starting a new chapter of perception.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 13 Dreams Die Hard

Dreams Die Hard

The juice place used to be a newsstand. I wonder if there are any storefront ones left

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like

Episode 13: Dreams Die Hard

Like a lot of people in media, I was stunned, rattled and deeply saddened by the surprise last spring that the New York Daily News was laying off half of its editorial staff. I didn’t work there, nor do I know anyone that does (in the past, I’ve known dozens who did), but rather it was the increasingly loud death knell it represented to the newspaper business and the reminder that one of my most cherished dreams is over.

I began reading newspapers before I began to read really. I was an avid baseball fan from the time I was four or five, and the 1965 National League pennant race enraptured me to the point that I was stealing the sports section just to following the standings, which means I think I knew what Los Angeles, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati meant, though I was completely clueless about my elder’s curmudgeonly insistence on calling the Dodgers “Brooklyn.” By the time I was 12, I had a career goal: write for a newspaper; the people that did got the information first. Yet when I was 30, I won two rounds of interviews at the Cleveland Plain Dealer and both times a decision was made not to hire someone for the position but go with local freelancers. Since I was a local freelancer for New York Newsday, I totally understood; I was reasonably sure that the sum total of my work there, which sometimes was two or even three pieces a week, was a LOT less than what a staffer made. That was as close as I got. I applied for many other spots and often heard that the position was budgeted below my pay grade. Whatever. I can’t complain for a minute about the success I’ve had freelancing and the culinary career I’ve built alongside it. Still, every now and then I think about what life might have been like with a cubicle to call my own, a terminal serviced by in house folks instead of the dudes at the electronics shop around the corner, a group of coworkers who shared my passion for journalism and a steady paycheck plus a 401K and vacations. But those daydreams come to a crashing halt when I realize that it would have been a double-edged sword: on one side, I’d have a pension and buy out money to live on, but on the other, I would never have developed this significant secondary career skill.

I still do journalism and I’m proud of it. One of the most esteemed newspapers in the world enthusiastically publishes my words about ten times a year. I’m not walking away from that. On the other hand, I don’t do it in pursuit of my adolescent dream, I do it because it’s a revenue stream and I desperately need every penny I can find. At least that’s what I tell people, and the reception varies. When one potential Ms. Right heard I was still writing professionally she gave me the same consternated look that she gives 30ish men who cling to dreams of fame and fortune in hip hop or in the NBA.

I think news of layoffs — whether the Daily News, ESPN in 2017 or that most esteemed newspaper in 2016 — would plunge me into emotional realms that code as depression, but I have to achieve some sort of performative conviviality for retail, so I maintain my equilibrium. This job also reflects the dramatic change in the recognition of print journalism. When I worked at Butterfield Market in the late ’90s, I had a few writers for Vogue (yes, ALT was one of them) among the clientele; one of them even came by and showed me my Cassandra Wilson feature before it was out. In 2003, at Garden of Eden, there were several New York Times writers among the regulars and I got a blow by blow account of the demise of Executive Editor Howell Raines. At Bedford Cheese Shop, there were a variety of New Yorker writers who often parsed the difference between the current truckles of Keen’s and Montgomery Cheddar. And lastly on Columbus Avenue, thanks to Jeff Gordinier’s piece, I had a wide variety of media folk stopping by to chat and try cheese. At my current gig, the media influx is fewer and further between for a simple reason; the ranks have thinned. And now these episodes of despair are coupled with an increasingly strong sense of isolation.

In some ways that potential Ms. Right was right in one way. I am still chasing a dream and doing via hopes of having a writing career (albeit in books rather than print journalism), but the dream has diminished considerably. When she and I were dating I envisioned corner desks and cubicles, long vacations to other continents, work related travel to other countries where I could get the scoop that the Jakarta Jazz Festival was now the leading event in Asia or some such. I’d dine in the pool of the leading food critic and chat with chefs about my days as a cheesemonger which would be long in the past.

My days as a cheesemonger are starting to recede into the distant past, and the dreams have diminished considerably. My dream at this point is to pay my rent without the obligation feeling like a pair of cinder blocks on my shoulders. I’d like to travel, but that means a quick run to Boston for a ball game and maybe a visit to a brewery like Trillium or Treehouse. I used to think that cheese would get me to that level. It did, but it was unsustainable. I don’t think craft beer will get me there. I’m too old, too dark and too fat. I do think writing can, even if that route is filled with landmines and torpedoes. Sure, web design might be a surer path, but writing is what I’ve got.

Or maybe it’s got me. Friday night around 10, I was wrapping things up at the store, eager to get out while the rain had let up, when a customer I hadn’t seen in a while crossed my path. He wondered where I’d been hiding. I told him I work only four days a week. I could see in his expression a curiosity about how I make ends meet. I told him of my writing endeavors. He brightened. He told me he wrote regularly for the Soho Weekly News and began to explain what it was (I guess I don’t look like I’m 58). I name dropped a couple of his colleagues and he happily recounted what it was like to write in the mid and late ‘70s.

I let on that I occasionally felt foolish to continue to pursue ambitions of writing in the current media economy, and he almost shouted. “You can’t not do it! If you’re a real writer, you have to write!!”

“What do you think about when you wake up in the morning?” He asked, his eyes flashing with zeal.

The right answer was coffee, but I knew what he meant, and he could tell I knew what he meant and smiled. I gave him a card. He looked at it and admired it for a second. I thought about telling him how easy Vistaprint is, but I didn’t want to interrupt.

“Don’t ever stop,” he said and looked me in the eye a smile creeping across his lips. “Bet you know that already.” He then headed on to do his shopping.

And with that gust of wind in my sails, I finished up and charged into the drizzly night feeling a bit better about the status and root causes of my dreams.

I don’t know if this work environment is sustainable but it is fun and rewarding

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 12, On the Fringe

Episode 12: On the Fringe

Nope, not the usual grocery store craft beer.

When I took my current job, I thought I was moving from the fringe to the mainstream. For much of my culinary career, I’ve worked in small, off-the-beaten-path or at least unusually located boutiques. Now, I work at a bright, gleaming, 18,000 square foot store, easily the biggest place I have worked at since I was employed by a superstore in Dallas Texas during the Carter Administration. And it’s a five-minute walk from Union Square, one of Manhattan’s biggest hubs. To give you a sense of proportion, I think the produce department at my current store is as large as the first iteration of the Bedford Cheese Shop, which I worked at in 2004, when it was still inside the minimall, next to Spoonbill and Sugartown book store.

I was wrong. When it comes to craft beer, I’m on the fringe. Grocery stores, even fancy grocery stores aren’t supposed to carry rare and exotic beers and we’re especially not supposed to sell them in an enthusiastic, knowledgeable way and promote them on Instagram.

Um, sorry.

At least, once a month, I hear from a sales rep “oh that’s not really for you,” in response to an inquiry about an exotic brew. One brewer that we proudly supported early on restricted some formats of his beer from my store and explained that he wasn’t distributing to that format to grocery stores anymore and didn’t want to make exceptions. “It’s a slippery slope if we start,” he wrote in an apologetic email.

All that is fine in one way and not so much in another. It’s fine since a chip on my shoulder is typically a good thing. I began using the hashtag #yesagrocerystore for a while until it began to feel shrill. Also, I realized the drivers for a lot of the small local breweries we work with were coming by even when they weren’t delivering; they dug the sandwiches from our delicatessen section. Since there are several beer bars that have excellent food, Milk and Hops, Fool’s Gold and Double Windsor just to name three, I took it as high praise for the rest of the store.

On the other hand, there is significant detriment. I haven’t been able to extend the brand that I’m building very much and monetize my skills. I went into this job with the idea that I could build it into something that would be self-supporting income in case the journalism income declined precipitously again. Those hopes are fading. Yes, success at retail has led to feelers from a couple of other outlets, both of them offering lower pay (um yeah, those were short conversations). My attempts to break into the bar world have been rebuffed; maybe there’s a glass wall. I fear that I fit the stereotype of the grocery store beer buyer who doesn’t really like craft beer but follows the sales patterns. I’m overweight and not white. About once every two weeks, someone — and not always a white person — is surprised to discover that I actually like craft beer and furthermore that I’m somewhat knowledgeable about it. The overweight part is something I’m working on; the stereotype blinders I can’t help. Also, there are some bar owners who know me from five years ago when lower body injuries were a daily problem for me. I am beginning to get back in shape and hope to lose the baggy jeans for catsuits as I did in my early 40s. It would be a very au courant and very Wakanda. And it would be a loud reminder that my cane is not a permanent part of my wardrobe.

Of course, out on the fringe is where I’ve lived most of my life. For years I didn’t fit into any particular African American crowd either. Then, suddenly in the late ’90s, I stumbled into a crew that like me grew up middle class, and more importantly we didn’t regard our Blackness as an anti-colonial stance, we regarded it as imperial. That is to say, if we took an interest in Wong Kar Wai films then guess what y’all, liking Wong Kar Wai was now a Black thing. Ditto lunches during restaurant week, classic American songbook, or anything else that caught our fancy. We weren’t fitting into new holes; we were destroying the pegboard. It validated new narratives. Unfortunately, as the new millennium settled in, rising rents, career snafus and other vagaries pulled us apart. In particular, I was pulled from the orbit of what was left of the group, since I had to work more and more just to stay somewhat afloat economically.

On a recent Thursday many of us reunited in the East Village. One of our old crowd was doing a reading at place near Avenue D. Once we got over the shock that we’re now approaching 60 instead of 40, the old rhythms resumed. When I asked one ringleader that I hadn’t seen in years how she was doing, she paused and looked me in the eye. Then she uttered a guttural, “I’m okay.” There was a pause. “I guess,” she continued. “You know what I mean.”

I did. And I loved that the pauses in her declamation were as charged as those in Thelonious Monk’s music.

The reading was magical. It reconnected me to the days when metaphor meant more to life than algebra and artistic expression was something to be lived not just blogged.

When I left, I looked at the night sky which was just beginning to envelop Avenue D and realized something important. I’ve been on the fringe most of my life. If I’m on the fringe in craft beer, it shouldn’t feel like an imposition. It’s an obstacle that I’m used to overcoming. It’s practically a homecourt advantage.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 11, The Boom Continues

Episode 11, The Boom Continues

Even if it’s not amongst other brews, Mikkeller beers are unmistakable

Mainstream media outlets don’t understand craft beer. They don’t get cheese either (much of the culinary press doesn’t either; one of my enduring regrets was that I was never able to persuade an outlet that they needed an artisan cheese columnist, specifically, me), but that’s a story for another time and perhaps another place. The media want the rise of craft beer to fit into a neat paradigm. It’s here, it’s hip, it’s either fading or not as cool and hip as we thought (i.e. a parallel to the Mast Brothers scandal and by extension all of the other $10 chocolate bars that aren’t ending global famine), or it’s been taken over by corporate food (there’s some of that in craft beer, but not as much as it might seem). No, the narrative is different A boom happened. Then, it continued. According to my journalistic sensibilities, when something is relatively new and defying the routine paradigms that govern expectations on its narrative, then that’s newsworthy. But as I wrote in Episode 1 of this endeavor, I’m no longer so confident that I know how the world works anymore. So, I won’t rant here. The boom that took craft beer from an 8.7 billion-dollar annual phenomenon in 2011 to something that is north of 25 billion annually today (more if you include breweries like Lagunitas and Ballast Point that are partially or wholly owned by corporate entities now) continues. I think I know why, and the reasons split neatly into two categories, price and accessibility.

Price seems obvious, but it isn’t. The obscurity of this owes to the fact that craft beer can be much more expensive than a six pack of Bud. I have bottles that retail for $40. Even though those bottles are outliers by standards of beers that are not aged in special barrels, a can of a great IPA from a local brewer might still run as much as seven or eight dollars, about what that six pack of Bud costs at a big box retailer. But that’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. First of all, most bars are charging seven or eight dollars for pints, or 14, 12, or even 10 ounce pours of great craft beer, so 6.99 for a can of a good locally produced beer is competitive if not comparably reasonable. Secondly, there’s another vital point of comparison. If you want to eat at a restaurant run by say, a Wylie Dufrense protégé or some chef who is just back in New York after a heralded stint at Noma, that meal is going to set you back somewhere in triple digits. If you want a bottle of wine touted by savants like Eric Asimov or Lettie Teague, that bottle may cost somewhere in the range of $30 or more. Suddenly $6.99 seems like a very reasonable point of entry to getting on an exciting culinary trend.

The price point has democratized the constituency for craft beer. When I worked on Columbus Avenue, many of my customers were high powered executives who lived near Central Park and bought exclusive beers a case at a time. Now, some of my customers are my coworkers who make a little more than minimum wage. I also have customers who work at the nearby Trader Joe’s and many others who will only see tony apartments on Central Park West if they crash an open house. I do have clientele who buy expensive beers by the case, but they are part of a mix that includes Asian retirees who buy high end IPAs for their book groups; NYU Food Studies students who arrive with several friends and meticulously choose great examples of three or four styles for their beer night; and of course, the young men and women who are the stereotypical craft beer consumers. Some brewers seem aware of the importance of price point and are deliberately making their beers affordable relative to other brewers. Industrial Arts, Radiant Pig and Edmund’s Oast all create excellent beers that retail in my case for under $6 for a sixteen ounce can.

The other element that craft beer has excelled at is accessibility, and by that I don’t just mean that a fancy grocery store has Snapple at one end of Aisle 2 has beers from KCBC, Finback, MIkkeller, Greenpoint and Singlecut at the other. Brewers have figured out something that retailers are only beginning to grasp. It’s easy to subdivide beer drinkers by levels of connoisseurship, but it may be just as valuable to divide them by level of thought process. For instance, I sell Bud Light and Corona, and the customers for those beers are people who really don’t want to think deeply about their purchase, and that’s fine. There’s a lot in the world to worry about beyond the beer in your glass. But those people exist in all phases of the market. The people who buy certain varieties of Lagunitas, Sapporo, Bell’s and Ballast Point, also do some with minimal thought and consideration of the other 450 beers I offer, and that’s fine. If a six pack of Sculpin is going to make your life better, then please, go for it. If your arms are full, I’ll happy tote it to the register for you. Yet there are people who love high end craft beer that don’t want to read up on Untappd whether a new Double IPA has a 4.2 or a 4.3. Instead they can just grab cans, which are distinctively designed in ways that brand each brewery. So often I see people arrive on the aisle and spend 10 seconds grabbing a few cans of great beer and heading off. The inverse is also true; I see people spend upwards of five minutes choosing a Mexican or Japanese lager or a variant of a major craft brewer like Harpoon or Founders or a bottle from Maine Beer Company. Beer is personal; some people spend seconds on the decision, and others take a few minutes.

Lastly, the other element of accessibility abetted by brewers is in naming the hops in the brew. This enables the drinker to understand the connection between agriculture and flavor (it’s something that the artisan cheese world and its media have failed miserably at. I still get people referring to “goat cheese” as if it’s one thing). Names like Against the Grain’s Citra Ass Down and Evil Twin’s Citra Sunshine Slacker have helped people understand that blood orange and tangerine overtones are a feature of the citra hop. Other beers rotate their hops like KCBC’s This is Your Brain on Hops and Westbrook’s Rinse/Repeat, and name the hops involved. Thus, without necessarily having a monger to sell their brews at the retail level, the craft beer field has managed to make its product and the knowledge behind it accessible. Maybe they don’t need mainstream media, even if I would like to do a few stories.

*****

Yes, someone at Greenpoint Beer has a sense of humor. Their early June releases were This and That.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 10, Holidays in the Store

Episode 10

Much of My Life Revolves Around These Beverages

There are several reasons that I tend to think my culinary career started at Petak’s, a small shop on Madison Avenue near Engineer’s Gate in Central Park, in 1986 rather than at Bloomingdales, the renowned department store, in 1984, and holidays are the biggest one. I had an office job for my first two years after college and while we usually worked weekends, the idea of working on most holidays was well beyond the pale. At Bloomingdales, we did work holidays like Memorial Day and Labor Day, but the idea of being open on Thanksgiving, which would have made an immense amount of sense for those of us in the fancy food division, was simply not on the table. Yet, when I got to Petak’s, not only did I work on Thanksgiving and Christmas, it was no big deal. All the key people did; it was expected of us. Petak’s was closed two days a year, Yom Kippur and New Year’s Day. Rick Petak, the owner, was fond of explaining the latter by noting that he didn’t want to be open with a hungover crew. Getting drunk on New Year’s Eve was expected of us too.

I wasn’t particularly bothered by working on Christmas (though it took me a couple of years to understand why I was supposed to go to Chinatown for dinner after the shift); I liked wandering the city in the late afternoon remnant autumn light. My family isn’t a Christmas get together group (our gather holiday used to be Thanksgiving but now it’s Mother’s Day). Over the years, it seemed like my life acclimated nicely to my retail work schedule. There were friends who hosted Christmas Eve dinners, a close pal hosted a New Year’s Night Amarone party. Since the wine gathering made drinking on NYE almost pointless, another friend in that crowd began hosting a New Year’s Eve bash built around hot chocolate, gingerbread and the steam whistles at Pratt. My college pals held summer get togethers the week before or after the major holidays. Although I still aggressively self- identified as a freelance journalist rather than a culinary professional, my leisure time certainly aligned itself nicely to accommodate the demands of retail.

Then, stuff happened. The college pals had kids. The hot chocolate and gingerbread woman was laid off and moved to Mexico City. The Amarone dude’s work dried up (he was a freelance copy editor), and he moved to Warsaw. Meanwhile I began working at a store that is open 24/7/365. If your schedule calls for you to work 10–6 on Thursday at the store, then you work 10 to 6 on Thanksgiving because it’s more Thursday than Turkey Day.

But as I prepared to work on July 4 this year, I realized that normalizing working on holidays has had a detrimental effect on me. As my pals moved away, my rents rose, and my career prospects dimmed. I began to work more and more. I didn’t mind; hell, I didn’t even notice. I like working; I’d go so far as to say I worship at the altar of work. I’m the son of two workaholics. My Dad dressed to go to the office every day, yet on days he didn’t go in, (meaning he worked from home) he’d forego the necktie. I found satisfaction from applying myself and completing a task. Always have. But usually, I finagled something to balance it. When I was an adolescent, I inherited all of the household chores from my older siblings as they moved out on their own, and not only did I prize doing “big kid stuff” I used it as time to listen to the radio stations I adored and intensified my relationship to music. When I was in my 30s, I had a gig at Butterfield Market, where I worked 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Friday, then 8 to 6 on Saturday. After the Saturday shift, I’d bike straight to the gym to do an hour of stretching and stuff that now files under restorative yoga. Then on Sunday, I’d awaken and take either a rigorous step or an incredibly vigorous house groove dance class before biking to bucolic setting (usually Hudson River Park) to read and agenda the following week. I felt like I owed it to myself to play as hard as I worked.

Presently, I work at the store Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. That meant that in 2017, I worked Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as well as New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. “Of course,” I chirped to anyone who thought it was odd. “It’s just another Sunday and Monday!” That remark had a bit of a nasty reverb to it. One of my leisure routines is to craft beer bar hop my way home on Sunday and well, there was absolutely, positively, no way I was even thinking about doing that on New Year’s Eve. As I kept to the routine and worked on the King Holiday, President’s Day and Memorial Day, I began to realize that the work hard play harder ethic was long gone, and I was duller for it.

This holiday season, I worked at creating an agenda to re-balance my life. It will feel liberating, which is kind of the point of the day, right?

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 9, The NY Times Modern Love Submission

Episode 9: The NY Times Modern Love Submission

The previous blog often used autumnal cityscapes as illustrations

…

When I began working at the store, I quickly imagined a scenario where I might be writing something aimed at the Times. However, that something was a piece on craft beer targeted at the Food Section. Instead, a seven-month journey that I chronicled in a blog series called Cooking for K led to a submission to the Modern Love section. The submission was essentially a synopsis of that blog series. Here it is.

The relationship ended via email, but I didn’t really mind. Not that I wasn’t crestfallen, but it was the sort of relationship that seemed destined to either become big and overwhelming and possibly lead toward a ring and an aisle and a registry, or it would peter out quietly.

It began as a crush. I work in a fancy grocery store as a craft beer buyer and as a floor supervisor. I chat with people all day; some I regale with the origin story of India Pale Ales or Saisons, others I show where we’re hiding the harissa or coconut milk while I ask them about what they’re cooking. Within the theater that is retail, I came across as the neighbor/boyfriend/uncle who cooked, and I was comfortable with the role. I’ve worked in and around the food business in New York since the ’80s, but this wasn’t how I thought I’d be spending my late 50s. I was a full time freelance journalist with a sidelight as a cheesemonger. When the journalism no longer produced significant income, I moved to cheese full time. When I was unable to generate substantial income in that field, I switched to craft beer. As long as I generate some journalism income it works out. Yet, savvy as all the pivoting made me feel, I was dogged by a sense of depression and dismay. I’d spent 30 years building my brand and honing my skill in two professions, and neither would facilitate a comfortable existence anymore. I meet lots of pretty women on the sales floor at the store, and many are in my demographic and probably share some of the same frustrations; but whenever we’d bond, I’d retreat emotionally. The stench of failure felt a little too close to the surface.

Then, one afternoon I saw her on the main aisle. She had a distinctive look, kind of a punky Louise Brooks. Her hair was black and in a bob; she had high, mesmerizing cheekbones and vibrant, penetrating eyes. She also had a septum piercing and an intensity to her walk. I sensed that she might be like me; Plan A failed, and she was now on Plan B. However, I was on Plan C, and as I watched her from down the aisle, admiring her attention to detail as she drew her coffee or ladled a pint of soup, I realized what had changed in me from B to C. I went into full time work in cheese with even more determination than I had brought to my journalism career. But now that I was in craft beer, I had mellowed. It wasn’t age, or at least it wasn’t just age; I didn’t trust that I knew how the world worked anymore. Rather than charging ahead — damn the torpedoes!! — I sallied forth, warily. I smiled as she rushed off to the register; I said to myself that today’s torpedoes don’t stand a chance against her.

She usually wore black cocktail dresses, but one evening she arrived in leggings with what looked like a Roy Lichtenstein comic book-inspired pattern on them. I seized the opportunity and asked her what she thought of the great painter’s mural in the Times Square subway station. Within seconds we were talking about art, public installations and whether Jackson Pollock’s Untitled would look good on leggings. She held me in her eyes and smiled as we spoke. Her response emboldened me to ask if she worked in the neighborhood.

Yes, she was a bartender at a craft beer bar down the street. I was stunned. I have no idea how I maintained some semblance of calm and cordiality as she invited me to come by and have a complimentary beer with her.

In that moment, I felt swept away. It had been years since I had seriously pursued a woman. Sometimes it was the toll of my career failures; other times it was simply a matter that my workaholic tendencies left me suspicious of pleasures beyond those of a job well done. And overall, fatigue played a key role; my rent continued to climb as my career prospects dimmed. I simply had to work a lot more to earn somewhat less than I did 10 years ago.

The fairy tale momentum continued when I arrived at the bar and through high beam smiles, we discovered that we had multiple passions — principally food, music and politics — in common. In addition, she was indeed on Plan B having taken up bartending after a career as a studio engineer failed. We also worked far too much for our own good. On my third or fourth visit to her bar, I broached the idea of going out on dates, she lamented that her work schedule was an obstacle as she usually tended bar six days a week, three in my East Village neighborhood and three closer to her home in Brooklyn. I urgently wanted us to have some sort of shared experience to build on our rapport. I thought about it and realized that a woman who works six nights a week probably rarely eats a home cooked meal. I love to cook. Whenever I reach a perch of solvency, one of the first things I do is open my home to cook for my friends on weekends. I offered to cook for her and bring her meals in Tupperware for her to eat after her shift. She liked the idea. I’d be her personal chef delivery service on nights she worked in Manhattan.

For the next six months, I stormed home from work, damning the torpedoes as I pondered the glories of rubbing wild caught halibut in truffle oil, simmering lentils with chopped broccoli rabe or combining berries and bitter greens with shreds of exotic cheeses. I would bring them to the bar and wait patiently while admiring her in action. Working with the public is a skill and she was elite; she comfortably embodied the roles of cool aunt andgirlfriend who drank knowledgably with grace; she always remembered the names of her customers. No matter how hectic her nights at the bar were, time seemed to stop when I’d present her with that evening’s creation. Our auras overlapped, the world momentarily shrunk to a space with her eager, warm smile and mine.

The meals had secondary functions. They were a way I could prove that I was consistent, generous and reliable. In addition, they began to suggest a domestic life for us. The fantasy included snacks to consume while watching Rachel Maddow, or a hearty breakfast for her before she hit the gym. While cooking, I’d often play music and imagine us dancing. After the presentation, we would talk until last call, sharing our fears and disappointments, intentions and ambitions. When I left, sometimes I’d be shaken by where my candor had taken me, but far more often, I’d bike home feeling embraced by the New York night, empowered by my openness, stronger for my vulnerability.

She was in her mid 30s, and my friends would wonder aloud if I felt competition from the younger, good looking men who frequented her bar. I’d tell them that what I feared most was her sense of duty to her jobs. She once told me that she was happy working all the time, a sense I knew well. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized I was mistaking contentment for happiness.

At times her work schedule would relent, and we’d plan actual dates, but they would fall victim to fatigue or sudden work invasions. Our mutual disappointment would suggest that the Sisyphean rock had rolled back down the hill. Then we would gather ourselves and push it back up the hill again. Yet, it was on one of those pushes, when it seemed that a series of late autumn walks through our favorite parts of the city loomed, that the email arrived. She only wanted to be friends.

The sadness took a while to clear my system. After a couple of weeks, I visited the bar again, intent of being friends. She had found her equilibrium in that context, but I hadn’t. I missed the warmth, the sense of possibility, and the validation. She served me beers, and we talked about the vagaries of our jobs and the coming holiday season, but it felt generic compared to our previous dialogues. The eye contact was minimal; no sparks flew.

I told friends I was fine about the situation, and I meant it. The validation I received from my time with her and the memories of her smiles made me believe that all things were possible. I hadn’t felt that way in a very long time. One night recently, I was walking home from the store and I saw a couple at the end of their date. They kissed warmly then he held the door open for her as she climbed into a rideshare four by four. He waved goodbye, then he scampered past me, smiling ear to ear.

I see scenes like that all the time. Often my happy empathy is spiked by regret and fear that I’ll never be in their shoes. This time it was different. The regret was that I wouldn’t play that scene with the bartender, but instead of fear, I felt hope. Maybe I would get that part but with a yoga instructor or a sommelier or some other woman who is too bold and resilient to the let the city’s expense break down her passion. The bartender opened that long closed part of my psyche, and my obligation to her and to myself — to those fleeting moments of us, really — is to never shut it again.

The Times wrote back a few weeks later, saying that the submission was “not quite right,” which was okay. They were doing lots of love and disability pieces at the time and they had just done a love in middle age piece. It was okay because writing the synopsis felt like closure.