I decided to try a prolonged fast, after about a month of doing some intermittent fasting, both for health benefits and spiritual ones. The first day was fine, aside from bike tires going flat mysteriously in the sweltering, muggy August air (Palm Springs muggy is the worst). The second day was on a good track, woke up feeling weird, but then fine. It wasn’t until late afternoon that anything actually precipitated.

It started simply enough, finding out that a long-time Boston “restaurant slash tourist trap” was closing, the latest place to blame the current crisis. For me it was a little sad, since I worked next door to the place for most of a decade, and counted many friends amongst the staff. The people who worked there stayed and generally like each other, so that’s something. Sure, locals would rag on it, especially the old-timers, but I myself used to put down a beer or three and a good share of Irish whiskey there on occasion. Usually their staff came to us though. We “tourist trap” folk stuck together, we got no respect from the bougie bartenders.

I started reminiscing, and all of the years I spent working in Faneuil Hall came back to me, all at once. The favorite underground hangout, literally, where we spent most of our time and money most days, eating dollar tacos and chimichangitas, that’s gone now. I miss the lock-ins that we would have before people got big mouths, hanging out with the bad kids doing bad things. I was bummed it closed too suddenly for me to say goodbye, I would have flown out for one more day of pint-glass margaritas with everyone if I had been able. Then it was the things that I could still do but wouldn’t mean the same, the chicken salad subs that we ate almost every day before a shift, usually in the sun because otherwise the bar wouldn’t be open. The grimy little locals bar that somehow hung on, around the corner, where we would sneak to for a shot on our breaks. The walks down Union Street, listening to all the guitar players playing all the overplayed songs, or turning the corner to hear better songs. Playing Buckhunter, or trivia, or darts. Talking to drunk tourists, occasionally kidnapping them to the next bar, always regretting it. Not wanting to go home just yet. The late-night halal place with the merguez subs, best eaten in the little park on top of the Big Dig, looking at the skyline at three AM with a couple of friends and a sneaky bottle of wine. Of course one can’t forget the karaoke, and the “chicken on a stick, one dollar!”, and the Scorpion Bowls. Sometimes we’d explore a bit, go on an adventure down State Street or to the North End, even to Kenmore and the Back Bay, but we generally stuck to our favorite places. Why go anywhere else? We had the best bartenders, and we were the best bartenders.

What’s the point of this nostalgia trip? Well at a certain point in my reminiscing, the fasting kicked in, and some kind of chakra burst open or something, and I had a spiritual realization. It shook me to my core, as all of these images flooded me. Images of most of a decade, of people, of memories, friends, strangers, living, passed on, moved on, still there, all the random faces of people I would see everyday but never knew. All of these years that I thought were wasted time, that I beat myself up over for so long, were meaningful. There was beauty in it, and I have spent so much time dwelling on the wasted money, the wasted time, the ways I hurt myself and others, that I never saw the meaning. The meaning was in the people, still to this day some of the best people I have met are the people I spent that part of my life around. The meaning is in the once foggy, now clear, memories. Even in the often embarrassing stories, certainly in the unbelievable ones.

I just wanted one more chicken salad sub, one more shift, one more shift beer, one more adventure party off into the night. That’s life, that’s why we keep coming back to this plane called existence. We rarely know what the last anything is, and it’s usually so mundane at the time that we don’t even know we’re going to miss it. I mean miss the whole time, the gestalt of it. One place goes, another, and many more will soon, I’d wager. The Faneuil Hall I knew has been gone for years, so that’s not new (I even had to double check the spelling), but I think I can finally process it all from a distance. Hey, it’s when I started blogging, if anyone remembers

http://thewildturkeysandwich.blogspot.com

So, to all the people I used to work with, party with, commiserate with, piss-off, make laugh, I hope you’re all doing well. I am sure I will see a handful of you again, as I have over the years, and that’s always a pleasure.

Farewell, that time of my life. Farewell, Zuma, Cheers, Durgin Park, and the rest..

Be careful doing prolonged fasts on a new moon, you never know when or how the Universe will crack your head open!

[Photo credit Jeff Keegan/Paul Donovan]