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And So I Do

Kevin Carey

I’m thinking of my dad taking me to
diners as a kid, sitting at the counter
and watching the short order cooks
like magicians with a spatula,
everything organized, piles of potatoes here
strips of bacon over there, columns of eggs,
scrambled, poached, three over, two on a raft,
a circle of perfectly placed pancake batter,
spaghetti with a bat and a ball,
plates sliding like a casino dealer,
coming and going,
filling the space, clearing the space, my dad
a restaurant guy and the world’s greatest
tipper, watching beside me with a shared
fascination.
I think of all the jobs I’ve had in my life
working beach-side restaurants frying clams,
pouring drinks in low lit barrooms, banging nails
and carrying bricks to build an adult peep-show house,
setting up fashion stages at a Florida hotel,
and the many basketball courts
in the many school gymnasiums, shooting video for
marketing tapes and documentary films,
and now the college classroom (for the past 20 years)
Did anyone watch me with fascination?
Was I ever as good as those short order cooks?
I think I’m good at my job now, the other day
I got three shy college kids to read a poem
at a public reading by doing a cartwheel between
the rows of desks (if they promised not to film me).
It took me many years before I found a job I loved
as much as this one. Maybe I’ve been persistent
perhaps a little lucky, perhaps good enough finally.
To be able to read and write and spend time discussing
books with college students is a dream come true.
In some ways I’m standing over my own grill now,
filling empty plates with ideas, a side of poetry and fiction,
a novel passage over easy, a short stack of poems to make you cry,
and I realize lately that maybe I’m living the advice
the old film projectionist gave to his young assistant
in my favorite movie— whatever you end up doing, love it.
And so I do. One order at a time.

Kevin Carey is Coordinator of Creative Writing at Salem State University. Books include: The Beach People, The One Fifteen to Penn Station, Jesus Was a Homeboy, Set in Stone, Murder in the Marsh and a new novel Junior Miles and the Junkman (Regal House / Fitzroy Books) which just won the Paterson Prize for Books for Young Readers and has been chosen for the Pen Faulkner Writers in the Schools Program in Washington, DC, and a new co-written poetry collection Olympus Heights (Lily Poetry Review). Kevin is the co-founder of Molecule: a tiny lit mag. A new film MFA: The Terminal Degree, a murder mystery comedy, which he co-wrote and co- directed will premiere in the spring of 2025. Kevincareywriter.com