Jeff Burkhart: If you can be anything, be kind

In the swirling chaos of a packed bar, one can often feel like a circus plate spinner or a juggler with several balls in the air. Or conversely, like someone with their balls on the floor and several broken dishes. And it can happen just like that.

My first memory of her was of her approaching the bar with a handful of empty, dirty glasses cobbled together piecemeal in her hands. It might seem like a welcome gesture, but it’s usually a pretext to refill glasses. And if you don’t have time to pick up dirty glasses, imagine how little time you have to actually fill them.

But she was different, right from the start. She didn’t immediately ask for something. Instead, she turned around and picked up another table’s dirty glassware.

“Where do you want these?” she asked.

“What are you doing?” I asked abruptly, especially when considered in hindsight.

Almost nobody does something for a bartender without wanting something in return: attention, appreciation or, most often, free drinks.

Few people — if any — ever wait to hear how you actually are after asking you how you are. “Martini?” is often considered a complete sentence. And in some cases, tapping a glass rim or raising a glass is considered more than enough of a request, regardless of whether or not you were even in the building when the glass was originally filled.

These are not offered as complaints, just observations. I know what I do and I am OK with it and have been for a long time.

Which is what made her so strange, in an odd and wonderful way. She didn’t want something. In fact, she didn’t want anything at all. And when she departed, she left me $20 on the bar.

You meet a lot of people working in a restaurant. Some are merely passing through, some stick around, some you never see again, some become regulars, others you wish you didn’t see as much and some you wish you saw more often. Almost the entire panache of human existence passes before your eyes, if only you take the time to look at it.

Working behind the stick, you learn that moments count, whether the moments it takes to pick three more olives or to hand wash someone’s special glass or to squeeze lime juice for someone’s Cosmopolitan. People are often unconcerned with time as long as it’s somebody else’s.

It took me a while to get used to her. I just wasn’t used to people being concerned with my well-being, especially not at work. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of people I wait on who are genuine and caring, but I’m there to do a job and I take that quite seriously. It’s their time to relax and be taken care of — not mine. That’s why they call it professionalism. Sometimes that gets lost in the modern era of so-called “mixology.” Sure, bartending can be fun, but that fun can’t come at the expense of being professional, at least it shouldn’t. It’s called work for a reason.

My new friend was someone who took pleasure in helping others, not that she didn’t mind being helped herself. She liked what she liked, but she liked it in her own ways. Those ways weren’t hard to understand, unlike say, someone who asks for a gin drink, only to return it three times before mentioning that they don’t really like gin.

Over the years, she stopped by on her way to somewhere else, and sometimes on her way back. Other times she came in for lunch, dinner or dessert, and sometimes simply to just say “hi.” And in a genuine way, not just as an excuse to drink because she really didn’t drink that much.

She would often tease the bartenders by asking, “Who’s your favorite regular?” And do you know what? We could all answer her honestly,  because she really was.

Leaving me with these thoughts:

• There’s never as much time as you think there is.

• It’s not about booze, drinks or even tips, it’s about people on both sides of the bar.

• In a world where you can be anything you want, the easiest thing to be is kind.

• Take time to smell the roses, because neither the time nor the roses are guaranteed.

Jeff Burkhart is the author of “Twenty Years Behind Bars: The Spirited Adventures of a Real Bartender, Vol. I and II,” the host of the Barfly Podcast on iTunes and an award-winning bartender at a local restaurant. Follow him at jeffburkhart.net and contact him at jeffbarflyIJ@outlook.com