Increasingly, I’ve come to recognize that all I hold near and dear in foodservice began when I was left to my own accord at the snack bar at Twin Fair.

It would happen like this.

My mother-flush with her paycheck-would drag my sister and I into Twin Fair on Saturday mornings. This occurred after I had participated in some athletic endeavor at an uncertain hour of the morning, and she would then hoist me onto a stool, purchase a bag of popcorn or snocone, and tell me in no uncertain terms to stay right there until she had completed her shopping.

Fine with me.

The snack bar of any major department store in the 1970s was a spectacle to behold. To my mind, it employed the most colorful characters (generally those unqualified to work in Auto or Guns), provided real time drama to the boredom of female-driven consumerism, and allowed me to glimpse into the world of how our great nation worked.

The self-important deal seekers, the aristocrats with their newly minted plastic credit cards- they were all shopping with unrestrained savagery in the aisles of Home and Beauty.

The snack bar contingent was an altogether different demographic. The customers who gravitated to the snack bar seemed to be troubled and brilliant, all at the same time.They had turned their backs to the modern department store experience and sat nursing cups of coffee, exchanging tales of union shenanigans, and smoking cigarettes.

Years later, when I came upon a snack bar in Target and experienced a weird rush of anxiety and deja-vu, I realized how profound my snack bar disorder had become a part of me. I stared at the menu board, dreamed about the utter simplicity of the operation, and questioned my very entry into the foodservice industry. I sought help from a counselor.

‘I was always more suited to open a snack bar’, was how I attempted to explain myself to the analyst.

Small inventory, certain food cost, high margins, limited seating and a single employee working the entire operation. My therapist challenged me on these assumptions, wisely asking if I understood the great real estate implications of a profitable concession.

My therapy included a significant amount of time on the website of the Gold Medal company of Cincinnati, manufacturer of concession equipment. I would input bogus numbers into their profit calculator and dream about opening a snack bar. The numbers always came out on my side.

People ask me-with some expectation of insight-what’s new and exciting in the restaurant industry. They would think less of me if I revealed the true nature of my troubles. That on some nights I am apt to roam about a city filled with great restaurants and superb dining choices, and instead  retreat to the snack bar, my back turned to people, reveling in the sparseness of the menu board, each option worse than the next.

As with any disorder, there is treatment.

But no cure.

I would like to reclaim this misused adjective.

That would be bodacious.

Adrienne Barbeau absconded the adjective with her series of dorm room quality posters and pinups. It was a remarkable heist. Really, it was an act of self branding before self branding was institutionalized and digitized.

It was ….bodacious.

But time has marched on. We are less of a bodacious nation and more a nation of complainers. More bold and brazen action is required to move the country forward, and here, so there can be no confusion, we are not speaking of military action.

Blatant. Remarkable. Bold. Brazen. You will find all of these descriptors in most definitions of bodacious. Last on the list, you also find sexy, voluptuous.

If you repeat the word long enough it never falters or loses its power. It is a triumph over the adverb absolutely, which has become the precursor to those who speak false knowledge or false truths. Whenever you hear absolutely used- mostly as  a rejoinder- you can assume that what is about to be said is unprovable.

It is not bodacious to say that something is absolutely true. To be bodacious requires action or form.

It is a blind Chinese man walking into the American embassy seeking asylum. It is Adrienne Barbeau still affixed to our bedroom wall.

Melvin Shahin realized early on in his baseball career that the chances of him hitting a baseball- or moreover, making contact with one - were slim and none.

We all know that slim had just left town.

So, it was no surprise that Melvin was instructed to crouch down to compact the strike zone by his Little League coach. This was the Seventies. No political correctness, no gender equality, no fairness, no transparency.

Winning was everything. And Melvin had wonderfully deep brown eyes-pools of Lebanese blackness- that twinkled when the coach sent him out to the plate.

It was their secret.

But very few secrets can be maintained during a baseball season. Once an opposing pitcher rolled a grounder to home plate when Melvin was in his ‘stance’ and the umpire called - STRIKE.

I’ll give Melvin Shahin this: he never complained. It was his duty to draw a walk, by any means necessary. He retired from baseball at the age of eleven. Today, he is a millionaire.

That’s clarity. That’s baseball.

The fiction writer is most often queried: “Which part is real?”

“It’s not real. It’s fiction.”

A momentary reprieve.

“Yes, but I recognize you in parts of the story.”

“Maybe so, but if I was in ALL of the story then it would be a confession. Do you want to hear my confession?”

A longer pause.

“No, thank you.”

This is one method to move the conversation along.

Doctor: “I’ve examined your brain MRI and found nothing remarkable.”

Thursday sounds spiffier in Italian.

Is spiffier a word in English?

Wouldn’t life be a bit grander if-left to our own devices-we drifted off to the coast of Smeralda, with a place to stay and nothing to do but get up the next morning.

Not wondering if it’s Thursday, the day of reckoning.

Friday is too late.

Billy Rufran was an excellent bread baker.

Some say too good for his own good. For years he consumed an excess of carbohydrates; not the sugar or fats of his trade but the deadly starch.

The white flour. L’Arte Bianca.

He had read about those who practiced it and decided he was a member of the tribe.But Rufran had another problem that portended demise, in a professional sense.

He was compelled to touch everything, inspect every product, and give final say before things were loaded into his oven. This placed an unreasonable demand on his body and twisted the neural wiring of his brain into a Bavarian pretzel without recourse.

Medication could only help relieve the symptoms of his anxiety.

Dough in the mixer had to be felt for proper hydration. Once on the table, Rufran insisted on all hands around the bench to make it up into its final shape. Machines were too punishing on the dough. Rufran relented only to the acquisition of one small divider, a Dutchess 36 part roll press that was older than he.

It finally occurred to him-much too late into the process_ that his bakery could never be more than slightly profitable, scraping by on thin margins since there was only so much time in one given shift to do what needed to be done. He deliberately chose to fail in this manner because he could not bear to go the other way, which was the way of those who were efficient.

He believed that efficiency begot loss of memory . In touching the dough, Billy Rufran remembered everything. His father. His first kiss. The afternoon of November 21, 1979, for example, when it snowed for the first time of the season.

Once he had an assistant who handled the dough with enough respect that he allowed her to load the oven while he dashed off on an errand. When he returned, he realized that he had not provided her with explicit instructions on how to score the bread- expert enough to suffice, most would say - but not for Billy Rufran, who tossed the whole oven load of baked bread into the dumpster.

Rufran closed shop that evening and counted his drawer. It was fuller than expected - where had the business come from?. He slid a hundred into his pocket. There would be better days than this and many more slower ones.

Day after day, feeling everything in his shop, putting his hands in the dough, and putting everything back in its proper place. It was easy to remember this way and harder to forget that he had chosen this particular path of failure, this fear of anything that might be an act of self preservation.

By the time we invaded Mr. Finn’s driveway and squatted on his makeshift basketball court for the summer, all of his children had grown up and flown the coup. The fact that we played ball in his driveway everyday, and for many summers thereafter, never seemed to bother Bob Finn.

He worked most of the time. He worked right up until the day he died. His wife, Jewel, would kindly smile at us and offer us a cold sip of water. And never, ever, did they ask us to leave their property and go play somewhere else.

One day, Mr. Finn pulled into the driveway in his big Oldsmobile around 4pm, jumped out of the car, and asked to be on the next team that had winners.  His set shot, from just inside the small stretch of tomatoes grown on the west side of his house, was deadly.

The game was close.

Mr. Finn was a lanky six-four and towered over our ten year-old limbs. His skin freckled in the summer sun and was leather to the touch. You could tell he had played ball in his day but his movements were unusual, somewhat herky-jerky.

Gabe, my teamate, guarded him closely after Mr. Finn swished a couple of set shots and his team grabbed the early lead. It was in the final moments of the contest (game up to 11) that Louie Muraca found an open Mr. Finn on the wing and got him the ball. Gabe and I had double-teamed Louie to attempt the steal but the pass made it over and Mr. Finn was ready to can another set shot for the win outright.

That’s when Gabe rushed him and knocked Mr. Finn to the ground with a hard foul.

Mr. Finn fell right, his leg fell left, and the limb separated from his body.

“Gabe,” Mr Finn shouted. “You broke my leg!”

I believe we all shouted in total, pre-adolescent horror.

Gabe saw what appeared to be Mr. Finn’s left leg adrift from his body, turned two, and started screaming all the way to his house. Only Louie Muraca got the joke because Louie was Mr. Finn’s neighbor, and privy to certain Finn family secrets. He calmly reached down and handed Mr. Finn his wooden prosthesis.

By the time Mr. Finn stood up, he was doubled over in laughter. He was a hard man. He worked in the office of a factory that, in some way or another made things, and had killed nearly all of its employees in the process.

Mr. Finn got by on one leg and a prosthesis, working everyday and loathing those who did not. But let the kids play was his philosophy, even if it meant surrendering  a slice of your private property. Let them play all day.

Gabe was another story. A spectacular athlete. The best I have ever known. He was drafted by professional sports teams, played a while in the minors, but hung them up before he really gave it a full chance. He was tough too.

Gabe’s toughness was bred by playing summer games, over and over, until he won at all costs, even if it meant knocking down his opponent and ripping their leg off.

And the toughest thing he ever did was turn his back on the games we played as children. He was certain of only one thing at that moment. The need to work. To not waste anymore time chasing dreams.

They’re in. The artichokes.

Staring at you in the produce aisle with fractal bounty.

Of course, the first impulse is to pick one up and immediately proceed to the nasty choke, nature’s protectorate of the yielding core.

You are a man, nothing more.

“Incapable of thoughts other than procreation,” said my doctor friend. “Women are the superior species. They can multi-task.”

“Yes, but doesn’t the Israeli army have a song or something about the joys of being born a man?’

It was my feeble attempt at comeback.

My doctor friend scowled. “It would be better,” he replied, “if we were not born at all.”

Here was a man smarter than I and yet now I wonder if he has ever taken the time to trim an artichoke properly to its very heart; the way he takes a scalpel to flesh in his daily practice and peels back layer upon layer of flesh, muscle, bone, nerve, to that what makes us better to have not been born at all.