Dear Feastlings,
He would more than likely disagree, but from my vantage point, my brother, catlike, has always landed on his feet. I know it’s inaccurate, filtered through the eyes of an other brother, but in my mind, from a very young age, we’ve had an ant-and-grasshopper thing going for as long as I could recall. Risky and impetuous decision after risky impetuous decision on his part was met with a marvelous invisible safety net, thoughtfully provided by the universe. Move back to Tucson after years in Colorado to take over a restaurant? Sure.
The deal falls through? I’ll just open Cuvée in the former Presidio Grill space to immediate success. Hey, I just found an empty restaurant back in Colorado- I think I’ll open a second Cuvée. too much work? I’ll sell an operating restaurant, a feat unheard of in an industry with hundreds of empty storefronts, fully furnished, available for a song.
Mitch would say to me this: “You idiot. Each of those experiences was met with a pain and suffering the profundity of which you’ll never truly know.” Or at least he’d say, “you idiot.” And he’d be right to remind me that the grass is always greener when I’m looking over the fence at his yard. He’s taken a drubbing every bit as difficult as mine, if not worse; he just doesn’t seem to let it get him down the way I do.
This week, though, I channeled by brother, not even intentionally, and I’ll be darned if it wasn’t fantastic. I loaded up food for just over 200 people today, the staff and residents at COPE’s six residential facilities, plus their treatment clinic, and even though we weren’t even close to having the cost of it covered, I went about it not the way I normally would (“Dear God, how will we ever pay for this?” but the way he would (“Ah, it’ll work itself out. I won’t give it a second thought.”) And sure enough, yesterday, a kind benefactor whom I’m quite certain will want to remain anonymous, came in and made up in one fell swoop the cost of sending food to a couple hundred people. Today, as I was packing it all up to drive out to a couple of COPE locations, my newish friend Rene Pacheco, who wears multiple hats at COPE, called me to say that they were in a bit of a panic, because they’d looked at the website and it said we were bringing them food NEXT Friday, June 4, rather than today, and sure enough, I’d never changed it from the original date we’d planned to drop off.
And it all fell into place:
-now I knew why we’d raised less money than usual, as it usually happens as the date gets closer;
-we brought food on the date they’d expected it, not on the date that they’d feared it was coming;
-our anonymous Princess Charming showed up at the eleventh hour and funded the missing chunk at the perfect moment.
Whatever the case, it taught me that I’ve been stressed all these years without needing to be. My brother knows things I do not, and has since we were children. So from here on out, whenever I’m freaking out, I’m going to try to remember to ask myself what he would do, and barring the part that includes addressing the issue with a Bourbon, I’m going to try it his way. Actually, I’ll occasionally do it with the Bourbon as well, now that I think of it. In any case, thank you, Anonymous Benefactor; thank you, everyone else who’s donated to this trip to COPE or any one or several of our past and future donation runs; thank you, staff of Feast. Together, we’ve now donated over 7,500 meals since the pandemic began.
I urge you, then to do what my brother would do, and operate under the assumption that the universe is going to handle everything and there’s no need to fret about it, and if Bourbon isn’t your thing, we do have two wine tastings this weekend. Island wines on Sunday,
but before that, their Continental counterparts tomorrow.
We’ve also got the dining room open now, at least for dinner service. And lunch? The universe will take care of that soon enough. I love you, Mitch.
Doug