Summer job

During the summer of my sixteenth year, I toiled away in the kitchen of a beloved local Italian restaurant.

Most weekend evenings at four p.m., I'd trudge up a cement ramp to the kitchen entrance and step from an August swelter into a maelstrom of preparation for the soon-to-be packed house.

It was the kind of place where three generations of one family happily overfed three generations of their neighbors' families, six days a week, including Sundays, for decades.

One parent ran the front; the other ran the back. The brothers lined up the meals, and the sisters served. It wasn't especially easy to tell the relatives from the non-relations who filled out the remainder of the staff, but we were all there: the waitstaff, and the bussers, and the dishwashers, and me.

I was the person you'd call for take-out orders: Pizza, veal parm, shrimp scampi, pasta in various shapes and sizes, and antipasti, which, I learned that summer, was not pasta at all, but a salad with meats and cheeses.

I'm not entirely sure I was good at my job, but I grew to feel somewhat accomplished. After all, I knew the difference between spaghetti, linguini, cavatelli, rigatoni, penne, ziti, and angel hair pastas.

The phone would ring, and I'd wedge it between my shoulder and chin. I'd scribble as the voice on the other end read off a list. I'd always ask if they wanted garlic bread before I told them when their order would be ready: 45 minutes to an hour. The garlic bread was my favorite.

I'd hang the ticket in front of its first destination. It would wind its way down the line, picking up salads and sides until the ticket and its corresponding boxes of food appeared at my station. I would bag them and clip the ticket to the top. The hostess or the bartender would appear through the swinging doors when the customers arrived, and I'd hand off their meals.

It was a process that would continue at least twenty times a night before the shift ended, and my father would be waiting for me in the parking lot. I would get in holding a small brown envelope filled with my wages and a share of the tips. Each figure painstakingly noted in the matriarch's steady handwriting on its pre-printed front, along with the taxes and fees that had been taken out.

I haven't thought about those days, or how hard everyone worked - seemingly independent of the others but seamlessly integrated like a watch for a sole purpose. I never thought about how lucky I was to be at the end of that line.

To be honest, I was surprised at the clarity of those memories as they came streaming back to me these many years later. Maybe something about waiting in a parked car for my daughter jogged them back.

Who, being more outgoing and personable than I had ever been, came sauntering out of her first official job interview with an unmistakable smile.

"I'm their newest employee," she said with a little squeal for emphasis as she got into the car. "I start next week."