I looked at Liz-S across the bar. “Hey, is this the last day you are the bar manager?” She smiled broadly, tossing her chestnut ponytail.

“I will stay, part time, but as of Monday I am an official grown up.”

“Awesome. It is about time. You are on your way.”

Friday’s at Willow are transitional days from the perils of the working week to the full-on activities of the weekend. People tend to skip happy hour to go home and get changed for date nights or clubbing, so we had the place to ourselves. Old Jim was in Vegas with Mary, and whatever they were up to is going to have to stay there. A week without him growling at us made me feel a little lonely.

Tracey O’Grady was standing at the end of the bar, hands on the hips of her white coat. “Hey, Tracey!” I called. “What is the special today?” She has been putting items on the menu for a limited time, like the Buffalo Beef Sandwiches on kummelweck rolls.

“Gotta keep it fresh,” she said with a broad grin. “I think you will like it. I have sushi with soft-shell crab or shrimp, or some all-beef mini-wieners with pomme frites and tempura pickles.”

“Holy smokes,” I said.

“Sort of like half-smokes, yes.”

“No, I mean I never thought I would see wieners on the menu at a fine dining place,” I said.

“It is the nosh for the night,” she said, and swept off toward the kitchen.

ISCM slid into Jim’s usual chair next to me, and John-with-and-H pulled out the earbuds to his iPod. “Whaddaya think,” I asked. “Wieners or Sushi?”

Jasper grinned from across the bar. “Sushi for me. It is like back in the islands.”

ISCM said he would try the wieners, and I took a long pull from the crisp white wine.

“This is a Red Letter Day,” said John-with. He produced a slip of paper from his pocket. “I paid off my car.”

“The FX35?” I said.

He nodded. “Yep. Only 28,000 on the odometer. I am going to own it until I die. Of course they asked me if I wanted to shop for a new one and I said Hell No.”

“That is a nice raise every month, though the Infiniti people would rather have you replace it. Why aren’t you doing something to enhance the economy?”

“They will have to do it without me. That is one thing. The other is that this is the day the wheels came off the Obama Presidency.”

I snorted. “You mean the Brietbart discovery of that publishing brochure for his first book that claimed he was born in Kenya?” asked ISCM.

“I saw that. It took about fifteen minutes for the Huffington Post to change the caption on the story to reflect the spin from the White House. I bet no one pays any attention to it.”

John-with looked disappointed. “Well, it turns out that the First Birther was actually the President himself. I remember when I first heard about Monica Lewinski. I was convinced Clinton was toast.”

“You were wrong about that, and I think the media will just ignore this like they do everything.”

“I think he actually was born in Hawaii, don’t get me wrong. I think what it means is that he wasn’t thinking about the presidency at the time and thought that was an advantage to seem foreign born.”

“Oh, you mean that stuff about him getting tuition aid as a foreign student? No one cares about that stuff anymore.”

“I think they have to pay attention to it. This is huge.”

“The White House says he never even saw the blurb from the publishers, and they just had it wrong, or were hyping the foreign-born aspect on that first book.”

“It wasn’t Dreams of My Father,” said ISCM. “It was some other project about race relations that he abandoned.”

“I think this explains a lot,” said John-with.

Jon-without and the Lovely Bea came in and sat down the bar. “Wait till you see what the Friday specials are,” I said. The Lovely Bea gave me one of those smiles that lights the whole dark bar.

“I mean, it really does explain a lot,” repeated John-with. “The whole stonewalling thing.”

“I think we are sort of beyond all this,” I said. “There is enough to talk about that is really screwed up rather than rehash whether the President claimed to be a foreigner when he was a kid. He might only have been thinking about being Mayor of Chicago at the time.”

“I think it is still an issue.”

I said it was just a war story from another war that had already been fought. The ISCM looked dubious, and then smiled with the little plate with the tempura pickles, delicate French fries and lump little hot-dog on Kate Jansen’s delicate roll arrived in front of him.

“That looks fantastic,” I said, and snapped a shot of the Friday Special.

“Can we talk about something besides the presidential campaign? Something not so controversial?”

ISCM nodded. “How about chasing war criminals in Bosnia. That was interesting.”

And so we did. That, at least, was a war that was over.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com