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Half the people complained that the café was too small. The other half complained that if it were any bigger, it would lose its old-world-small-town-mom-and-pop feel, and they would stop coming in. The only opinion that most of the customers shared was that they, for the most part, each felt like they deserved a special discount as a reward for their loyalty and patronage.

The owner was the most insanely sane person most people had ever met. He had a name, but I was introduced to him as “Boss.” The name always stuck, because to this day, he’s the only boss I ever really wanted to work for. Everyone liked this man.

“Boss” had insight and perception that contradicted his seemingly minute attention span. What the people didn’t understand was that the owner was so perceptive that he was dividing his attention evenly between their world, his world, and all the other worlds he had elected to tune into.I was the latest monkey to try and take over the joint, trying to prove to myself and the owner that I was a responsible, caring, and productive right hand man. Every time I tried to assert this self-imposed definition, the owner would reassure me that he held the reigns just fine, but every time I doubted myself, he’d hand me the reigns until my ego had settled back at the half mast position a perfect stalemate existing between fully over-blown and flaccidly limp. It was a good gig indeed.

I had my moments though. As calm and cool and collected as I thought I was, there were days in which I’d sneer at the uptight art-deco Jewish bitch and call her out on her ridiculous attempt to short change us for a couple of free espresso shots. I can call her a Jewish bitch, of course, because I too am Jewish, and she even called me out on it, which oddly enough made me kind of like her. That was how things went down there.

When I thought the place was closing down, I mean the first time, I nearly cried, and it wasn’t because of my one year of blood, sweat, and toil that I’d given to the joint; no, it was because the joint had become a part of me, and without it, I feared that I would lose my place in life, and tailspin out of control.

That was my reaction the first time. My reaction was different on the second time, and all the way until the last day that I worked there, (which at last count was the forty seven or forty eighth time). For these times, I finally understood that the place would never be allowed to close, because even though half the people thought it was too small, and the other half thought that it had already become too big for itself, all the people would continue to show up to it whenever they needed to feel loved. And this is because the place was and will always remain a place that feels like a holiday; the restaurant was our community’s own Thanksgiving, only Thanksgiving now occurred more than once a year, and this was nice, very nice.

Did I mention the fact that the owner was the only man I’ve ever met whose own mental faculties rival my own insanity? Last I checked, he was nearly twenty-five years my senior, yet socially, I felt like the odd man out, as though I were was forty-five years his senior, which means that we had seventy years of socially divergent years to separate us from achieving a shared vision for fun.

But reality is often ironic, and our social age gap along with our very real age gap somehow made for the perfect foundation of what remains to this day the most bizarre and mutually symbiotic friendship I’ve ever been a part of.

We had a mutual respect for our very different ways of life, and it created a bond that I’ve never shared with another human being—and I don’t ever want to share that bond with anyone else, because bonds are like memories, they should be uniquely creative and fulfilling.

When the bacon was burnt and the eggs were dripping and runny and the windows created a greenhouse effect that made me want to slit my wrists, I still attempted to roll pizza dough and lightly bake it at four hundred and fifty degrees in the oven. And I did this because I always do my job the hardest and best way that I can, but I also did this because I didn’t ever want to ruin Thanksgiving for the neighborhood.

When the band became bigger than the restaurant, and we began closing early and taking breaks in order to practice for our shows, I knew that somehow we had annexed the Fourth of July to the band, which in turn was connected to the restaurant, and so now the restaurant consisted of not just one holiday, but two.

I wondered how long it would be before the owner would somehow create our own Christmas. I knew he would, someday, because “Boss” was somehow able to turn his crazy visions into a reality, and it was a masterful skill that I desperately wanted to learn, and that he desperately tried to teach me.

The four weeks before I finally got the balls to give my two weeks notice were the worst four weeks of my life during that era. I never physically cried, but my heart ached from attempting to stifle my desire to cry, and my desire to thwart the inner changes that were begging me to change the course of my life. Basically, in hindsight, I was feeling crushed because I didn’t know how to tell the family that I was no longer going to be able to make it home for every Thanksgiving.

Something inside me, however, was telling me that I needed to take this community and its magical holiday atmosphere, and spread it in other directions. I needed to take what I had been taught, and I needed to teach it to others, by example.

As I was motivating myself to spread the restaurant’s unique and (tragically) rarely discovered message of love and altruism—

—something came at me from the right side, speeding recklessly and it was beyond my control and I couldn’t stop the thing but I wanted to so badly and I wanted to yell and scream and take back time and make the thing not do the thing that I knew it was doing and going to do but the music was in my ears and the wheels beneath me couldn’t stop in time and the thing was coming at me, large and white and metallic, and without brakes and so much speed and dizzying speed and no brakes and the thing and the music and the people and the sun and its angle against the window on the thing and the feeling of the thing and my body humping like horny drunks in an allyway—well, it accomplished its mission and it sent me flying into a dizzy new world.

The dizzy new world was now devoid of not just Thanksgiving, but also of the Fourth of July. I was now completely severed from the restaurant, from the band, from the community, from the holidays, from the altruism, from the love, and from my family.

Don’t get me wrong, the family tried to keep me included, but I wouldn’t let them. I needed to be alone. I couldn’t heal with their help, and they understood this, because, well, family always understands.

But I had another family. They were huddled somewhere in the Middle West, which is actually quite far east, but when settlers were settling this nation of mine, they settled from the East to the West, and so they miscalculated the grandeur of the overall settlement, and mistakenly coined this middle Eastern section of my nation as the Mid-West.” But now that we fight wars in a place that we call the Middle East, perhaps its best that we don’t have our own Middle East—it could be confusing.

So I decided that I’d had enough, and I remembered that there was a community I wanted to join in a small town in the so-called middle west that would help me write about the altruism and the love and even the big white metallic thing that had hit me, and indelibly changed my attitude, and therefore, the next era of my life.

The only problem was that I was always really bad at saying goodbye. Not just bad at it, but really bad. I never knew how to say goodbye, because I didn’t believe in goodbyes, as a concept, I still don’t.

I think that saying goodbye is like purposely cutting off your nose in order to spite your face—it makes no sense, unless you can actually see the future, and you can tell that you are actually never going to see the thing again that you are saying goodbye to. I said goodbye to my dog before my parents were going to take him to the Vet to put him to sleep.

Instead of goodbye, I like to say “later.” As in, “see you later.” Because that’s how I feel about the connections we make in this world and in our lives. I feel like time is endless and expansive until it no longer is endless and expansive, but you never actually know how or when or why the expansiveness is going to go away, so you may as well chase the ends of rainbows and keep searching for a pot of gold.

Because you have fun in the hunt, and you feel a cathartic release when you tell others about the hunt—but the only part that doesn’t really serve any purpose is the actual moment in which you either do or do not find the thing you seek—that part is always a let down.

I will always cherish that restaurant, but moreover, my friendship with “Boss” and the lessons he taught me, that I am only now beginning to understand. One example of this would be what now seems like an obvious fact; that in life, no matter who you are, and how much you think you’ve figured it all out, when you reflect on happiness, you will always discover that it is the moments that you enjoy, and it is not the achievement of your goals! There is actually a finish line, but it’s how you reach it that matters, not when you do. Thanks “Boss.” Fan On.