long ago and far away...

 Today is National Dive Bar Day, among other things, according to my west coast brother.  Thinking about that has brought back a long-ago memory to share.  It was the summer of 1967 and I had arrived early in upstate New York to begin a new teaching job, middle school art.  It was six weeks before the beginning of the school year because I had spent earlier weeks of the summer helping care for a dear aunt in Pennsylvania.  After I paid the deposit and first month's rent on my very cute third floor attic apartment, I realized I was out of money.  With eight weeks to go before I could expect a pay check, I went looking for a job.  There was an ad in the little local paper that said "Wanted, attractive barmaid, no experience necessary." You could run that kind of ad in 1967.  Well, the 'no experience' part certainly fit, and, at 22, I was still pretty confident about my looks.  So I strolled into Joe's Bar and Grill (name changed to protect the innocent), a dark little bar that was as close to a dive bar as I will ever come.  I said I was answering the ad, got the job, and started that very afternoon.  My hours were 4pm to midnight Monday through Friday. My customers were almost all men who worked in the nearby Catskill resort hotels in the summer and went home, somewhere in the south, in the winter to work in the chicken processing plants.  Consequently they had the strangest mixed accent I had ever heard.  Joe invited me to go to Florida with him for the winter when he closed the bar.  I didn't say yes, but I also didn't tell him that I would only be there for six weeks. The patrons only tipped on Fridays when they got paid but were a very friendly bunch.  Joe carried around a huge wad of money to cash their checks.  We only served straight shots and beer, so I learned the barmaid job pretty quickly.  I can tip a mug and get just the right amount of foam with the best of them.  And, as the weeks went on, I began to understand their accent, which proved very helpful when school started and I met their children.  I quit at the end of the summer with some made-up excuse, not a problem since Joe was going to be shutting down anyway, and started my year of teaching. At the end of the first day of school the custodian came into my classroom to clean, took one look at me, and burst out laughing.  He was a regular at Joe's.