ESSAY – AUGUST 2008

By Joshua Bodwel

“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” —Daniel Burnham

For a short time after graduating from high school, I languished. During the summers that I turned nineteen and twenty, I waited tables at the Colony Hotel in Kennebunkport. That grand old lodge, built in 1914, teeters atop a rocky promontory overlooking the Kennebunk River flowing into the Atlantic.

Today, those two summers have blurred—I know that I wore my hair almost to my shoulders one year and buzz-cut the next. There are many moments, however, that remain etched into my memory.

One summer, my great-grandmother, my nana—a woman who was born in 1902 and never drove a car until she was seventy-five years old—died the same month that my girlfriend left me. I reacted by working every dining-room shift available for several months straight. I threw myself into serving others in hopes that it would heal my heartache.

While I was required to wear black pants, a white shirt, and a cheap, clip-on bow tie, the busboys were further humiliated by being forced to don shapeless green vests. The only rebellious addition to my uniform was a pair of shiny black-and-white wing tips, which I wore in place of the usual dress shoes favored by the other waiters.

I arrived early to the dining room, where I would clean my station and fold more cloth napkins than I could possibly need for my shift. Once guests arrived, I trolled up and down the dining room, logging mile after mile as I ricocheted from table to kitchen, kitchen to table. I reveled in the predictable order and repetition.

I waited on guests for their entire stay, which was often a few nights or a week, but occasionally as long as a month or two. I prided myself on knowing who liked tea with dessert and who wanted black coffee with breakfast. I remembered how my repeat guests liked their meat prepared, who had an aversion to shellfish, and who wanted a lobster dish at every meal. I tipped my busboys better than the other waiters, and in return most of them would do anything for me. I forgot about my own needs by catering to those of others.

When I wasn’t working, I rode my bike around town. I sat at the beach. I lost weight. I slowly read Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls or strummed my acoustic guitar. I scratched poems into an old composition notebook and later typed them out on a 1920s-era manual Royal typewriter that had belonged to my grandfather. One morning, I went out to mount my bike and it was gone. Eventually, the heartache went, too.

I was soon flirting with the nannies of wealthy families from Quebec or Massachusetts. And when wedding parties tore into town for a weekend, I joined the waiters who mingled with the smiling bridesmaids, though management had told us not to. How does one say no to dancing with a beautiful woman? One night, I sat up late on the kitchen’s loading dock with a nanny from New York City. In a circle of light, I listened to her life’s story, I told her my hopes and dreams. The moment felt charged and important, though today I only remember her name—Shannon—not the details of her life.

But the exact chronology of that time has faded. When did we snatch the key from behind the front desk to unlock and explore the old hotel’s attic? When did we convince that eager but unintelligent busboy to arrive in the dining room wearing a waitress’s uniform? And how did I ever manage to win an “Outstanding Service” award one summer?

Most nights, after my shift had wound down and the hour crept toward midnight, I swam in the hotel’s heated saltwater pool. I would float on my back in the darkness, suspended in the womb-like water, and stare up at the star-studded sky. I must have thought about my nana on some nights, about how, when I was eleven years old and saw Halley’s Comet with her, it was her second time seeing that comet, which only shoots by every seventy-six years; we’d huddled around a telescope on Parson’s Beach in cold, windy pre-dawn. And I must have thought, bobbing in the warm water, about how each night’s swim brought me closer to the season’s demise.

In the pool, my life felt limitless. But what did I do with that feeling?

Years later, older and with my life taking turns I’d never imagined possible, I sat beside that pool late one evening with a group of my closest friends. We laughed and imbibed. We told stories and reminisced. We celebrated our dear friend who would, in one week’s time, marry the love of his life on a tree-lined green beside a brimming river.

My youthful summers at the Colony were summers of small plans—and, I see now, they were summers of missed opportunity. In those days, I was still limited by the compromise of small dreams.