How to Escape Work

My greatest gift and biggest curse life has handed to me has most definitely been creating and sharing businesses with my husband. It swings both ways and the pendulum is merciless. There’s the dreaming up and creating something together. There’s nailing an event and walking home to talk about it from each of our perspectives. There’s seeing someone in our group grow and the ability to watch that together. Then there’s the radioactive bombs of the every day that throws the pendulum aaaaaaall the way to the dark side. I spend time thinking that we are either the luckiest couple alive, or, how the hell are we still alive? With that question still unresolved in my head, I like to throw it back to the world and its inhabitants. As market research, when I tell people I work with my husband, I wait for the reaction. Everyone seems to have an opinion, though very few know from personal experience. There’s always a pause, followed by something emotional. ‘Oh’, ‘oooooof’….you work with your husband!!!!???’. When you add ‘I own restaurants with my husband’ the pause and emotional response gets even bigger. ‘OHHHHHHH’, ‘ayyyyy que difiiiiiiiicil’, ‘must be soooo tough!’. They all feel for me in a way, few envy it.

I sometimes day dream I’ll come home to a husband that knows nothing about the type of work I do. Like a nurse, coming home to his finance husband. ‘How was your day babe?’ He would say to me in my day dream. ‘Oh my god today we had to perform…’ , I would start explaining and then pause. ‘Never mind honey, its too technical, my day was stressful but good’. And we would be done with that, and on to - Open the bottle, tune in the music, life! Plain and simple. But perhaps no wife talks to her husband in this way, no matter the line of work and how those lines cross each other’s paths.

It’s been a summer of intense work and of taking back the reigns of our businesses. Its been a time of diving deeper in. Deep, deep, deep into the most obscure aspects of our projects in order to dig out that jewel, back into surface. Our kids left to overnight camp so this gave us time to be laser focus on things and as we were injecting life into Colonia Verde, and restructuring Comparti entirely (read about how the world of events has turned upside down), we have also been connecting the dots to make Iberico a reality (our new wine and tapas place, coming soon!). Its been a sweaty summer of rebuilding, reimagining and creating from scratch.

‘We gotta get the fuck out of here, Felipe’, I texted him one day. I turned to my buddy, Claude, to ask for advice about a last minute get away with my husband. I gave him all the filters, of course. ‘I want a real escape, no work talk’. ‘I want it to smell good’. ‘Nature’. ‘I want to eat well (but not end up talking about restaurants). ‘I want to walk’. ‘I also want to just sit at a beach’. Claude really tried, with offers that took me around the world. Puerto Rico, Guadeloupe, New Mexico. Nothing quite worked. I ran out of credits. ‘Felipe how can I run out of credits with Claude!?’. It turns out, not even a robot can help us escape ourselves and our work.

All along, Felipe, per usual, had the initial idea that actually worked. Montreal. For some reason, the idea of Canada bored me (sorry Canadians, I was so wrong!) and the idea of a six hour drive scared me. It would lead to more work talk when we wanted so desperately a break from that. But not even Claude could solve it, plane tickets were insanely expensive, and our timeframe for this escape was to leave the next day. So we booked a hotel, packed a bag, and got ready to leave the next morning.

I got into the car and texted my wine friend Steven. ‘Give me three places to eat, please. No more than that’. I am over traveling with a list of twenty something places. When I travel this way, it begins to feel more like a list to check off, with very few room for discovery.

‘Joe Beef. L’Express. Vin Mon Lapin’ Steven replied.

I get a text from my friend Celestine. ‘I saw the movie Sirat. I need to talk to someone about it’. Oooof. I felt both happy and sad for her. ‘I am not going to ask you if you liked it’, I said, ‘But do you regret watching it?’. ‘I do’, she replied. I did too, when I first saw it. It took me weeks to surrender to the pain of watching it.

I grabbed Felipe’s phone and put on the Sirat soundtrack. Electronic music, with a storyline that includes a desert, a lost child and walking the thin line between heaven and hell. I remembered an interview on Interview Magazine with the director, Laxe and all of a sudden I felt the need to retrieve it and touch that sentiment.

‘Gonna read this interview out loud’. I told Felipe.

Maybe we were on our way to catharsis. ETA says four hours now.

We arrived! The first twenty four hours, my mind was still racing and at a NYC speed. I was in Montreal but I couldn’t quite land there. I felt antsy and scattered, still with aches of the mind and of the body. But as we walked and walked, I was able to leave my thoughts, like taking off layers of clothing.

Montreal is clean and it smells nice. With a perfect 70 degree weather, the layers I was carrying all of a sudden felt easy to slip off. The temperature feels like an extension of the temperature in your body and I found myself swimming on air. Montreal is old and its new, too. In the culinary front, its electric. It’s got this ‘let’s make it like THIS’ energy, where a young crowd is exploring how to do food and wine in ways that feel basic and elemental yet new. At Limbo, we drank a bottle of Jules Metras, son of one of the natural wine Greats, and ate french bites that felt fresh and punk rock, like his owner Harrison (hopefully coming to an asado next season!). We ate foie gras at L’Express where I didn’t know if the place had been there for decades, or if it was brand new. I never googled to find out. The feeling of that was what mattered and stuck with me.

We walked some more, we biked. We saw art that moved us. We took a hike and made a picnic at Oka beach. We had a whole day at Bota Bota where we jumped from cold to hot water pools. At Joe Beef, after Steven suggested we go, Felipe and I sat side by side at a booth, facing the entire dining room. We analyzed couples and made up stories about them. Who was more head over heels for the other in each of the relationships? We wondered. And why are so many women on their phones!? We analyzed and laughed our asses off and ate too much food. And in a slur of wine sips and bites of sweetbreads, the calculation in my head began to make sense. I was reminded that I married my best friend and how much fun we have together. When it comes down to it, when there’s time to spend, we want to spend it with one another. And perhaps between the pain and the bliss, if there’s great time to be had, then the great times absolutely outweigh the bad.