The Job Hunt and Fayette

For the rest of the summer I was half-heartedly looking for work. I was asked to house sit once or twice. On the cooler days I went out to one of the local berry farms to pick berries. I think the pay was something like four dollars a bushel.
That wasn't going to help me pay for car insurance or get me to any of the reenactments.
I was interviewed by the manager of a small restaurant that I will call Milly's Mild and Messy. My title is far less appetizing than the actual name. The manager of this restaurant was terrible. She would be the Messy part of that title. She was a mix between Miss Hannigan and Matron Mama Morton.
Despite the ad in the classifieds asking for a cook or a waitress, she seemed determined to make every new hire into managerial material instantly. Basically, in a training period that consisted of two days you were to learn how to do everything she did, followed by one day opening and running the restaurant on your own. 
The cook position involved staying in the kitchen, the waitress position was a misnomer.
As a waitress  "everything else" you were required to run the cash register, take and make carry-out orders and take walk-in orders. If those choosing to dine in wanted meals that required cooking, that part of the order went to the kitchen, the rest you did yourself, as well as run the bakery display, make sandwiches and panninis, make cappuccinos and any other hot drinks, carry the hot meals to the sit down customers, bus and clean the tables including the two bistro tables outside, clean everything outside of the kitchen by the end of the night (deep breath) and!!!! somewhere in that time you got a twenty minute lunch break.
Now I'm a smart kid. After the first few days I got the basic gist of the thing and my biggest frustration, really, was having to remember how the stupid deli sandwiches went together. And I never did appreciate the tables of teenagers that came in, each one ordering a different cappuccino.
The lunch break was probably the best part of the job, though. Milly, who isn't really named Milly, is the Mild part. She was the best oriental chef I have ever had the pleasure of being around. She made incredible food, including Kim Chi, and would send it home with you if there was extra lying around. You got to eat your fill of whatever the day's special was during your lunch break...if you got a lunch break and she was sweet, inside and out.
Her manager on the other hand...well, I had more than a few customers grumbling about her including one who made a point of pulling me to the side, ducking her head and saying, "You're boss is a bitch!"
I quietly excused my boss's behavior at that particular juncture.
I'm pretty good at getting along with and/or ignoring the people in my life that annoy me. I don't like friction unless I'm causing it. That may be a poor admission on my part but, I like people to get along; especially when all of us have a singular goal in mind. If we all want the same thing, why fight amongst ourselves?
My boss didn't see it that way. If she wasn't standing over your shoulder gawking as you put together a panninni (I hate being watched while I work it makes me nervous, especially the first time!), or bashing the guy who cleaned the kitchen and took out the trash, she was whining about how awful her life/husband/children were and how badly she needed a smoke. And really..truly that was the root of the problems. She was always jonsing  for cigarettes, and constantly having to train or rehire new trainees made it harder and harder to catch the time for a smoke break.

I did a Google Maps search and found photos of the spot where the restaurant used to be. It's been many things since "Milly's" shut down. I'm fairly certain it's still sitting empty at the moment.

I worked there about two weeks and in that time I had seen at least two new hires leave, one in tears, days after they had been hired because of the way the manager treated them during training.
Sure it was a small restaurant, trying to make it in a farming town that doesn't like novelties, caters to fast food and has a Wal-Mart as the pinnacle of its social venues, but that's no reason for new hires to leave your establishment in the middle of the afternoon in tears!
The manager was trying to make it work. Unfortunately Milly's great cooking and the manager's hard-ball ways weren't enough.
At an event in Tiffin, Ohio, after much deliberation and conversation with my fellow soldiers, I did the dirty deed and called in sick. The manager didn't seem too heart broken to see me go, and I wasn't too surprised when the restaurant disappeared a few months later.
Tiffin, on the other hand, was a fun event that I saw through to the end. The relationship was there and it had continued to blossom, somewhat awkwardly. Unlike Jackson, however, we had the whole company with us and my relationship and I, and a few others shared this magnificent structure.

If I had been shy of the guys before this event I quickly learned that when it's cold out and you have only one blanket, body heat is the next best thing. No such thing as being shy.

The straw enclosure became known as Fort Humpter and was our temporary abode at Tiffin. I believe this was also the event at which a fellow soldier died magnificently while managing to dislocate his shoulder.

My next job was a fantastic three week run at a relatively popular buffet chain in town. I was hired as part-time dish washer, part-time fry cook. This meant that after hours of fried breaded chicken, ochre and shrimp making, mashed potato blending and scalding hot dish sorting; I came home sore, tired and smelling awful most every night.

My boss was a cross between a reality tv-show host and a wanna-be drill instructor. I got the idea that he was in the reserves but never actually confirmed it, he just had that bearing about him.

The uniform for the job was blue pants, non-slip work shoes and a uniform shirt. By the end of the first two weeks the lot was so thread bare from repeated washings that the seams were starting to fray. But frying-oil smells so God-awful by the end of the day that you dare not let it set in your clothes over night.

One Sunday evening, THE most profitable night for this particular business, I ended up in the dish room. The first three hours I worked up a rhythm. Spray, stack, wash, dry, grab every dish on the tray in one move, ignore the burning in your raw hands, stack them up and move on. (They told me to wear plastic gloves but I was so paranoid about them melting that I didn't bother. Besides once they're wet on the inside they're kind of pointless, and when you are working with a dish sprayer, trust me, everything gets wet.)

For the rest of the five hours I would get an occasional glass of something cool and refreshing handed through the stacks of dirty dishes. Every once in a few eons a teenage co-worker would come back to tell me that the boss was going to send one of them to help me in a bit. But they never did help. Just came back to give me false hopes. I didn't complain. I didn't whine about the constant stream of work or the fact that the piles were so high that I literally could not see past them for most of the evening. I was constantly working with my hands at a job that I had near perfected. And there really wasn't time for anything else.

I cleaned and stacked until every dish was in its place, then helped the night manager clean the rest of the kitchen before finally leaving, around one in the morning.

I went home, I showered the smell of over processed food and dish soap away from my body and I slept like the dead. The next day I went in and my boss pulled me to the side.

He said I was a 'real trooper' for working eight hours non-stop in the dish room without complaint.

He slapped me on the back to prove just how much of a trooper I was.

Then he handed me three gold-colored coins.

Not a raise. Not a day off. Not a day out on the hot bar, away from the grease and having my pants and shirt wet for eight hours. Three...nearly useless...coins.

It's like going off to fight for king and country and coming home to a pat on the back and food stamps.

That's essentially what these things were. With one golden coin you got nothing. Once you had earned three you got to have...wait for it....

Free access to the nasty, greasy, overcooked, glazed, tastes-and-smells-like-grilled-shoe-leather-and-ketchup food that you have been cooking and wearing home for the past three weeks.
....yay.

I quit soon after.

First, what I had done in the dish room was what most of the employees should have been willing to do on a regular basis, and not necessarily worthy of the 'special prize'. Second, getting shiny things as a reward is great for two-year-olds and cocker-spaniels but young adults attempting to make a living and pay for actual bills need something a little closer to big-people rewards. Like discounts for all family members; or a gift certificate to replace the thread-bare pants I was forced to wear every night.
Third, I knew I could do better.

Oddly enough, as I flipped and flopped through my jobs each location was literally higher, geographically, than the next.

Before I started working at my next job however we had our second-to-last event of the year. Fayette is gorgeous and the event is usually the first weekend of October.

Sadly most of the photos I collected of my early reenacting career were deleted when my laptop died last year. This is part of the grounds where the battles take place. And for that matter, this is the unit I first joined.

This particular year the weather was incredible. Sunny and cool most of the time, with the leaves just starting to turn and the grass so green it hurts your eyes to look at it. Driving past the cast iron fence with canvas already erected on the other side I felt like screaming for joy. It had been another long stretch between events and I was ecstatic.

I arrived, dumped my stuff and changed into my uniform, and because it was warm and most of the place was grassy I opted against wearing shoes. I greeted a few of my cohorts that were already on site and went looking for something to do since I was, per usual, incredibly early. I ended up assisting with registration for a few hours, all the time casually checking the street just beyond the trees and the cast iron fence. Not being obvious about the fact that I was missing someone relatively important to me.

As the sun started to set, and most of the familiar faces were in with their vehicles, erecting tents and preparing for the night's relaxation the familiar vehicle of choice pulled up. Some of the other members of the unit were there with him so he favored me with an odd accent and asked where he could park (as if he didn't already know.) I pointed him in the proper direction and waited. I knew he would be back. Something about the way we clicked together told me he would come back on his own. When he did he was in his vehicle, leaned out to tell me to get in, and before he need say anything else I was belted into the seat beside him and we were heading out of the park.

I remember I was elated to see him. I also remember the odd feeling of seeing the car seat in the back.  We went to dinner and had a fun time, went back to camp and set up. I had bought some painter's canvas at Lowe's and some of the guys helped me fit it together with poles and rocks and some spare tent pegs and I actually had my own she-bang for the first time.

I still used the footlocker from Dad and it fit under the tent.  I was settled and thinking about sleep Friday night. With the cool breeze blowing, a blanket over me and my bare feet poking out of the end of the tent I was fairly comfortable...and yet something was missing. Someone was missing...I thought to myself, he won't be able to sleep.

Sure enough, moments later...at first I thought it must have been ants that were messing with my feet. Then it didn't stop and I jerked up from my blankets to find him grinning impishly at me from the mouth of the tent. First words out of his mouth?

"I couldn't sleep..."

That night we walked around in the darkness of the rather large park, visiting the Yankees briefly (who were I believe, climbing and falling off of hay stacks this particular night), and finding a quiet bench to ourselves.

Despite the previously mentioned drawbacks of this new 'romance' there were other things from my past that were making things difficult. One of which was a bone rattling fear of intimacy. A big part of it had to do with tragic events shortly following my 19th birthday. Some of it had to do with being part of a broken family, and some of it had to do with being 19, and having spent most of those 1.9 decades believing I was ugly, unwanted, and just a little scary to most of the men around me.

To this point I had been convinced that my new relationship was just a fluke. Something of a desperate or crazy man that would eventually fizzle, and of course everything I was feeling towards him was just a response to being so well liked. I liked being liked, that was all. Besides it was WRONG! Right!? And yet, that night at Fayette, when the perfect romantic interlude produced itself and instead of being swept off my feet I was trembling and frightened and avoiding his eyes, I knew something had to be said.

That evening I shared some of what had happened to me, and I explained how very scared I was, how horrified I was every time it seemed that those events from my past might duplicate themselves. I kept telling him that it was me, not him, and he kept saying he understood. That he wouldn't push. He DIDN'T say that it was just a friendship...because we both knew it wasn't.

We also both acknowledged that there were places we could not go. Because for how tabloid this whole thing sounds, it was different. It was like watching two people, who have forever eaten only processed foods, and canned vegetables, step onto a farm for the first time and take a bite out of a real, ripe, off-the-vine tomato; or a stalk of fresh asparagus from a patch, or a ripe peach from the tree. There was more to the coming together of us than a romance paperback, and both of us recognized it. We valued talking, verbally exploring, laughing, fighting like children, and fighting together as soldiers against a common enemy. When one of us was out of camp for very long the other of us noticed, and would be uneasy until we were together again.

Yes there was a physical aspect, but it was just as much about the very invention of the thing, than it was about simply being included.

It was my first stab at real 'love', but I had NO idea where it was going. I just knew where it couldn't go.

The rest of Fayette was fun. Two battles on Saturday and one on Sunday. Saturday it was relatively still through the day and during the battle the smoke from the cannon fire was so thick, and the trees so dense, that by the time the Yankee infantry took the field we couldn't see them until they were well within firing range.
Sunday afternoon we had a bit of an upset. I was still in my 'war-rage' stage of reenacting, determined to out-shoot, out-fight, and out-die the enemy at every turn. One particularly young group of Yankees opposite us were flanking often but never actually advancing.
The Captain of our unit saw this and after watching a few of these little maneuvers he took a small company up the left flank, and because the other company refused to fire, we essentially walked up to them and took them prisoner.
The Yankees didn't much like this. After all there were five of us and twelve of them. At least one of them was young, way to young to be on the field holding a weapon. We ordered them to put down their weapons several times but the youngest Yankee kept his gun up, this wicked psychotic smile on his face.
We were less than ten feet from the audience and the Captain had already gone over to the red-faced Yankee in charge to figure out what to do now. The young Yankee was presenting a safety hazard with his gun up, and the rest of us so close, so one of our senior members made a move, stepping in and grabbing for the gun of the young Yankee soldier.
I swear I saw the kid grin before he pulled the trigger. The blast went straight up into the trees, knocked down some leaves and twigs and the concussion knocked our man to the ground. The sound drew both the commanders back and just like that both groups retreated back to their respective lines.
We were not happy, and there was a picture in the paper of our group as we retreated. The photographer of the picture graciously labeled it "Confederates Bravely Facing the Enemy", but no..it was a forced retreat, and at the moment we were putting up a lot of resistance to the order.
We eventually were incorporated into the rest of the confederate line and all of us went out in a grand blaze of glory when they uncovered a Gatling that one of the exhibitioners had brought onto the field. But we were not happy.
I wanted to string the kid up by his toes then parade him in front of the commanders and parents (or whoever) that had thought it would be a good idea to let him on the field. We made sure our guy still had his eyebrows and grumbled our way back to the tents. While it turned out that this wasn't the last event of the season, it was the first time I experienced great disappointment at an event. That's why I say, never fear. If we plan to show up at an event, we will burn powder.
We left the event to go our seperate ways Sunday afternoon. The sun was shining and I had music going the whole way home, a two hour drive for me, fifteen to twenty minutes for most everyone else in my unit.
I had more job hunting to think about, if I expected to make it to Gettysburg.