z food & drink: the blog: Family

Maureen says:
Life doesn't stop because you're opening a restaurant. Not exactly a newsflash, I know, but a reality nonetheless that I sometimes find completely and utterly annoying. Like last week, when five minutes before we had to leave for a Very Important Meeting, we heard the ominous sound of running water that could only be a burst pipe.

Other life stuff of as late includes a tenant giving notice that he was breaking his lease for personal reasons. Having a vacancy at this time of year is less than ideal. I mean, come on: how many people are looking for a place to live in the middle of winter? And where, exactly, were Tom and I going to find the time to show the unit to anyone who was?

Situations like this, I am learning, tend to sort themselves, but only if you don't lose your head. This is when being overly busy becomes your ally. With so much to do and only so many hours in a day, even my predilection toward worry and overthinking have to take a number. And when the number came up for this particular worry, it proved moot. We had a new tenant in the form of Tom's cousin, Nate, who's embarking on his own adventure by trading the West Coast for the East for a while.

Nate worked for Tom when we lived in California and now he'll work for Tom (and me) again at Z. We're happy to have him, lucky to have him and we have the added bonus of a visit from Tom's Aunt Jackie who made the cross-country trek with him. They arrived yesterday afternoon and already things seem easier. Family's good that way. Great that way, actually.

Me, I'm hoping that this trend of things sorting themselves, retaining my head and not ever having to truly panic continues. Cause the calendar? I'm tired of it mocking us, taunting us and generally behaving as if it were the almighty and sole ruler of the universe.

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Maureen says:
Yesterday Tom's mother sent us some photographs of her maternal grandfather's restaurant, in Middletown, New York. The Mid-Mont, named for its site at the intersection of the Middletown and Montgomery highways was, to Tom's best recollection, a bar.

A bar fit well with Tom's memory of his Great Grandpa, Carl Schumacher, as a big, strapping man--a firefighter--with a shock of white hair and a wealth of silver dollars in his pocket that he doled out to Tom and his sister.

The pictures, however, belie Tom's interpretation of what, exactly, the Mid-Mont was. Below is a view of dining room from the kitchen. What's off camera, to the right, is the bar Tom recalls as well as a banquet room.