mind body mama: Let's all go to the bar

A while back I broke my Sunday Facebook sabbath to post a single line by Joni Mitchell.  An hour later, Dre stopped on her way home from the hardware store to see if I was really at the bar.  And there I was, at a front table with the Nectarine, sipping a glass of beer.

I lived on this block, bookended by bars, for ten years before I ever darkened the door of the classiest dive.  I would wave to my neighbor, the Motorcycle Man, when he stood by the side door smoking, and keep driving or jogging past. 

But the ink was not even dry on the Nectarine’s lease in the Quirky Mill Town before she was sampling the brews on tap, chatting up the bartender and making do with the Sox game when she would have rather watched the Yankees.   

So it came to pass that the Nectarine and I established a loose pattern of meeting up for a weekly beer.  As we fell into a rhythm we opened our table to other women in my circle.  Now the Nectarine is back to the big city but a week does not pass without face time with my friends.  Some stop by once and again, but a core of us have committed to this ritual as if it were the oxygen that sustains us.

I protect and celebrate my bar time fiercely.  My family knows the response to my weekly call: let's all go to the bar.  I worry about how this looks: that I am glorifying drinking and debauchery, that I am selfish to put this sisterhood ahead of other things.   I wonder how it reflects on me as a mama and a business owner and a church lady.  I think sometimes that I should cover myself and call it “girl’s night out,” before I remember that I am a working class dyke and people like me don’t do “girl’s night,” we go down the bar.

The truth is that drinking is not what happens at the bar, although drinks are usually poured.  Debauchery doesn’t happen either, although each of us has said something to make someone blush—possibly each other, usually ourselves.   Pretty much nothing happens at the bar: sometimes we play music on the jukebox, sometimes we talk to the bartender, sometimes we see the Mayor.  At nine o’clock the lights come down and the music comes up, incrementally.  On one night a free pizza was delivered; on another, the Bruins noisily lost.  These were big nights, by bar standards.

So what made the World Traveller exclaim, as she looked at her watch one night, “Nine-fifteen?? How could it only be nine-fifteen?  So much has already happened!”

There are so few times where nothing is planned beyond the condensation weeping down a cold glass.  Here at the open table, when nothing is happening,  there is room for our actual lives to be made visible.  Someone we haven’t seen for a month might rush in with her shirt inside out to show us the frustration and fear and joy with which her family welcomed another child.  Jender and I might arrive flushed and posturing from boxing, with all the brilliance of practice and exertion pouring off us, and all the grief and rage of our training history lapping at our heels.  Any of us might drink shots, drink soda, arrive late, leave early, talk too much, keep quiet.   

All of us leave our problem-solving and professional niceness at home.  We show up balls to the wall, ready to tell the truth about what frightens or infuriates or animates us.   Or we have nothing  to tell, and just gather in the dark around the humble campfire of friendship, pushed by our primal furry selves towards connection. 

It’s the same drive my Small expresses when she clambers her whole long almost ten-year old self into my lap: I just want to beeee with you.

It’s the holding of this space of nothing that allows us to reveal ourselves to one another, to experience what someone called the sacredness of relationship.   This is, I think,  the “so much” at which World Traveller marvelled.

If going to the bar mirrors anything else in my life, it’s worship.  I don’t go to church because something holy will always happen there.  I go to church because it holds a space for holiness in my life.  It is the place to practice being open to something larger than myself.  Because I practice, I am increasingly connected to the holy throughout my life.

I go down the bar because I love my friends, because for a few hours each week  I want to put my love for them ahead of any number of other things in my life, because I want to see them and be seen.  I go down the bar because it holds a space for love and witness in my life.  I go down the bar because when nothing else is happening there is room for laughter and terror and compassion and inspiration and confusion.  There is room for love to flash like a neon sign, to turn up its speakers, to shout like sports fans, over and over reminding us that there is no greater force.   I go down the bar because it is the place where I practice being myself, and because I practice I am increasingly myself throughout my life.

If you want me, I’ll be in the bar.