There are some things that need to be written, and yet I have no idea what to say or how to start. So I ask you to bear with me, this isn’t an easy thing to work though.
One of the hardest parts of this job always has been and always will be the separation. It’s something you get used to though, something you adjust to. You get used to living two lives at once, to missing holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries. You learn to reschedule Christmas and Easter, to plan for birthday celebrations at multiple times in the year rather than the actual day you joined this crazy world. You learn to work around missing almost anything.
But when you’re away for the death of a loved one…that’s an entirely different story.
People say email has no tone, no connected emotion, but those people are sadly mistaken. You know, just as surely as if you’d gotten a telephone call. You always know.
And it’s never who you expect, if you can ever expect anything like this. Death is like love, it comes up and pounces on you all unawares.
Joe Smith was my family’s closest and probably dearest friend (next to my Uncle Eric, who passed years ago when I was in London and whom I will randomly miss at unexpected times to this day), he was as ordinary as his name. Your typical average Joe. He was honest and loyal and always willing to lend a hand or a shoulder to anyone who needed it. He listened to everything and judged nothing of what he heard. He tended bar at the local hotel down the street from my house, and always used to tease me when I was too little to set foot in the place and used to hover outside the door while my parents went into visit him. It was an occasion when I was finally old enough to walk into the Snug legally, even though at the time I still wasn’t choosing to drink. The day I first ordered an actual drink, he looked at me in total shock. I don’t think he ever actually expected me to say I wanted to order anything but a Shirley Temple. He was at every Christmas, every birthday, every thanksgiving, my mother used to say that he was one of her orphans, and she was always wanting to make sure there was a roof over his head.
Joe said something about me once that has never left me, much as I go through phases of wishing that it would. I never heard him say it, my parents told me later, at the time I didn’t really realize what he was talking about, and then I went through several stages of being furious at him for slapping such a label on me, but now…now that I’m older, and love and life have smoothed their healing over so many of my old resentments, I find I’m able to take what he said about me as the compliment it was meant as.
That’s a Saturday night girl that is. Back when I worked at the mill, there were always all these girls hanging around. Those were the girls you took out Monday to Friday and had a good time with, but you never went near them on Saturday night. Saturday night was for the special girl, the one you took home to meet your mother. The one that meant something. Shaughnessy? She’s a Saturday Night Girl.
Joe taught me that if I treated myself with respect I would always come out ahead. He taught me that if you love with all your heart the world can ask nothing more of you. He taught me that there are people in this world who will keep getting up no matter how much life kicks you around. He taught me to not give up.
The Summerlands has gained a fantastic bartender, and a good, kind, wonderful man…and my family has lost a very dear friend whose absence will take some getting used to.
And for myself, well, for me, as always, the show must go on.
But I will always thank him…for teaching me to think of myself as a Saturday Night Girl.