Tonight I made my first ex wife crack.

We have an older Polish woman who is a waitress for parties. She is an insurance agent by day and she waits private functions at night. She has an obvious like for me and every time she works for us, my line cooks crack jokes and call her my girlfriend in Spanish.

Tonight, I was getting into it with another waiter, and this waitress, A., suddenly blurts out, “nobody gets anything past chef!”

I paused, and replied, “except my ex wife.”

I think, after five years, that is the first crack of that nature I have made.

We have a new line cook, to replace the young woman who left. He is this 50 year old Russian guy, a shred taller than me and wider. I was intimidated because he looks tough. But then he got plucky on the line during a rush and I put him in his place with a controlled blast of fury. It is always tough in the kitchen and today the various personalities push here, pull there, and I have to manage them, viscerally, to keep them producing at a high level of quality.

To have to be pushed to execute at a high level is strange for me, because I have always wanted to do that, to be great. But I suppose we all have our limits, where we say, no, it is too much, I don’t want to make that effort, I am OK here for a spell.

The other day, M. came up to me and said, “we have a red flag issue, there is a problem with consistency. Someone said they came in today and the BBQ sauce tasted different and we have to make sure it is the same everyday.” I thought it over and was like, yeah, that makes sense. Right before service Jimmy knocked over the cambro of BBQ sauce, we were out of a primary ingredient, and so I mixed what remained of our batch with a brand I like from the store.

M. likes that when she notes discrepancies I can usually pin point the reason for them. It is a good management style on my behalf, showing our successes and misses are not random and it gives the owners confidence in what I am doing with respect to our successes.

One of my favorite vorts from Rabbi Zaidy, z’t’k’l, was the story from the Gemara of the upside world. I first heard it in Lakewood, during Pesach. In this event, a sage has a near death experience, where he is in a coma. When he comes to he sees his father.

His father says, “my son, you’re alive, but you had been dead, what did you see?”

The son says, “I saw an upside down world. The great people of this world were little, and the little people of this world were great.”

The father says, and even now I am crying a bit typing this, “No my son, you saw the clear world. This world here, is the upside down world, the world you saw was the clear world.”

It was a fear I had many times, when I was in full throttle, that subtle element of G-d’s greatness in this world being absolutely humbled by our free will, and it is upside down.