“Nice Christmas card,” I said, as I walked into Willow and saw Old Jim as his customary position at the apex of the Amen Corner. I was surprised to see his lovely wife Mary with him. She normally joins the barflies as a work in progress in her downtown grown-up suit. This evening she was in jeans and a festive crimson top.

I looked in vain for a place to sit down. A big crowd of Fish and Wildlife Service folks were Occupying the small tables across the aisle from the bar. They had built no impromptu structures in Willow’s lounge. They are nice folks, but in order to accommodate their number, they had appropriated all the stools from the bar.

My phone went off, and I took a late business call from an eager beaver looking for SCIF space to pitch in a government proposal, and I tried to remember what the status of the rented secure space out in Fairfax. As the government contracting business teeters in the balance with the budget uncertainty, we are all looking for opportunities wherever we can find them.

I heard in the course of the day that Boeing, Lockheed and Northrop-Grumman had started laying people off, and it was a chill wind on the back of the neck that had nothing whatsoever to do with the coming winter.

When I got back inside a stool had miraculously appeared in my customary place at the bar, and Katya, her dark Byelorussian eyes smoldering, was pouring me a glass of happy hour white. I smiled and tried to put the business day behind.

“Great freaking card,” I said, and Mary beamed. “But don’t take it personally, I don’t think I am going to do cards this year.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” she said. “This is the first time we have done Christmas Cards in thirty years. We just couldn’t resist that picture of Jim my sister took in Canada last summer.”

“It is priceless,” I said. “The bulldog head on Jim’s cane is a dead ringer for him. Fabulous picture.”

“Bah, Humbug,” said Jim with a scowl.

“And that was the perfect caption for the picture. Bah!”

“Humbug!” he responded, and took a sip of his Budweiser long-neck. “He gestured at some Millennials seated in the conversation nook. Those assholes have been sitting over there drinking tea for two hours. That is why the Fishheads are camped out over here.”

“I know you would give them the boot, if this was your bar. But Willow is nice to their customers.”

“Too nice,” he growled.

“To what do we owe the honor of your presence Mary? You normally don’t get here until later.”

She laughed. “I had to take the dog in for shots, and I was planning on going into the office at noon. Then I decided that I would just play hooky today.”

“Bless you. ‘Tis the season,” I said. “I confess I am down a quart on Christmas Cheer this year.”

“My pal Judy is coming by later, so we are just going to have a day off- sort of an extra three-day holiday on the eve of the holidays.”

“Nice,” I said. “I feel like I have been ridden hard and put away wet. That trip to Michigan about finished me off, and I don’t know when I have to go back.”

“Nice card,” said Tracy O’Grady, Willow’s proprietor extraordinaire. She appeared across he bar, and like Robert the chef, she likes to make a pass through the bar before things really get rolling in the kitchen. Her luxuriant ginger hair was pulled back in a pony-tail and she wore a turtleneck Irish fisherman’s sweater that set off her peaches-and-cream complexion nicely. “It really was perfect. I posted it back in the kitchen so all the staff could see it.”

Tracy did not seem to be in much of a hurry to get to work, and I noticed her eyes looked fatigued. “You look tired, Tracy,” I said.

She shrugged. “It is going to be busy until after New Year’s, and Restaurant Week comes early this year. That will be on the 9th, and then it is Valentine’s Day and then Saint Patrick’s Day. We don’t get a break, and frankly it is pretty brutal this time of the year.”

“I heard you served 250 Thanksgiving dinners,” said Jim.

“Yep. And then right into the Christmas season. Two days off a week doesn’t make it, plus there is all the book work.”

“Who does that?” I asked. “Do you have a business manager?”

Tracy shook her head. “I do it all. I have a book-keeper, of course, but I have to keep everything straight and do all the reporting to the County and pay the taxes and all that. It is a real snarl.”

“How many people does Willow employ?” I asked. “You are exactly the engine of employment that everyone keeps blathering about.”

“I have fifty on the books,” she says. “And what a nightmare. When one of the waiters gets parking tickets the County comes to me. I think they ought to do their own jobs.”

“And child support and all that, I imagine.”

Jim snorted. “Everyone is a little short these days. The restaurant business is a tough one. I saw a column by George Will about how hard it is to stay in business. He wrote about Carl’s Junior, the hamburger chain out west. It started with a guy who bought a hot-dog cart and put it across the street from the Goodyear Plant when he saw the number of war workers. He got hassled almost immediately when the city insisted he had to have restrooms.”

“A hot dog cart with restrooms? That would put all those people out of business downtown.”

“Carl cut a deal with a gas station. That was bad enough, but Will claims that there are 57 categories of regulations that apply to the restaurant business.”

“That seems about right, said Tracy. “It is bewildering. All I wanted to do was cook great food and run a fun little place. I learned the business the way it used to be, and I barely figured that our before everything changed. I have no idea how it all works now and I have been doing this all my life.”

“You do that very well,” I said, taking a sip of happy hour white.

Jim said: “The upshot was that Carl’s is no longer building outlets in California, but are going to open a hundred in Texas next year. They employ like 70,000 employees.”

“Yeah, but who wants to be in Texas?” I asked.

“Not me,” said Tracy, and turned to walk back to the kitchen.

Judy walked into the bar and sat down next to Mary around the corner. “Did I miss anything?” she asked brightly. “Nice card, by the way.”

“You haven’t missed anything yet,” said Jim. “But I haven’t thrown those jerks out of the conversation nook.” He finished his current beer and signaled Katya for another. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Don’t make any more trouble for Tracy,” I said. “Sounds like this is hard enough as it is. She has got fifty people to take care of. Small business takes big energy.”

“Did you hear about the latest from those loons at the conference at Durban?”

“No, now what?

“The Revolutionary Government of Libya has a scheme to solve all the world’s problems. They sent six delegates to the climate conference.”

“Well, along with South Sudan, that makes 200 nations with interests in the climate.”

“Oh, they have an interest, all right.”

“They are oil exporters. Why would they want to go green? What are they up to?”

“They are suggesting a monster geo-engineering project that would not just cool the Earth by 6 degrees centigrade, but it would cut carbon dioxide emissions to zero by 2021. It would reverse global warming, provide power for two billion people, lower sea levels and restore the climate of 1750.”

“Sounds like the dinner that cooks itself while you drive home from the office. Or the Popeil Pocket Fisherman.”

“Nah,” said Jim. “They say they want to build a few dozen eight-mile wide venting towers to create constant winds in the desert to drive massive windfarms which in turn would electrify the world.”

“Awesome,” I said. “What a great idea. Any idea what this would cost?”

Jim took a deep draught of beer and brought the bottle down on the Willow napkin with a thud. “They figure they can squeak by with $45 Trillion. That is the “T” number.”

“Holy smokes,” I said.
“They figure that by 2080 the climate will be back to the way it was in 1750.”

“That is amazing,” I said. “But what was the weather like that year?”

“It sucked in England, and that is the only place they know about.”

“You just can’t get value for a few trillion dollars anymore, You know?”

“Bah, Humbug, said Jim, and finished his Bud with a grin.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Editor’s note: I checked when I got home. The British climate of 1750 was described by Horace Walpole, Member of Parliament, who wrote: “[The year] opened with most unseasonable weather, the heat being beyond what was ever known in any other country”. Severe earthquakes and widespread flooding followed.