Part of your story

While I was in St. Louis on this last trip, I was staying at a hotel with a bar/restaurant. I was only staying two nights and after traveling all afternoon and checking in, I decided that is where I was going to sit and relax for a bit. The bartender was a very friendly, tall, African-American man who took my wine order and then promptly went back to the rowdy crowd needing a majority of his attention. I enjoyed my relaxing glass of wine quietly in a corner table reviewing my work for the following day and then left to the lobby to meet up for dinner with a coworker. All seemingly quite normal just being another stranger passing through a hotel bar with her computer.

The next after a mind numbing 7 hours in a conference room trying to speak through a lost voice whisper, I headed for my relaxing glass of wine. It was fairly early, around 4pm, and so there was no one at the bar yet except the same bartender from the evening before. He greets me and then pulls up the exact brand/type of wine that I had a single quiet glass of yesterday., without my saying more than “hello”. I commented to him what a great memory he had for only hardly seeing me once for one drink. He smiles and places the glass on the bar and we start small talking about weather, news, celebrities. Meanwhile, he continues to set up the bar for the night and needed to go get ice from another part of the hotel. We were laughing and he shakes my hand and says “My name is Celester”. I introduce myself and he tells me he has to go get ice but if anyone wants something to make them whatever I want. I smile and look down at my phone as he turns to grab the ice buckets. As he comes out from behind the bar, he hands me a book, open to a page and has me read a paragraph. It was quote from someone I don’t remember about the importance of making your bar customers feel special, even if you have only seen them once, and how the bartender in many countries is an integral and revered position to hold.

As he came back and I read the back of the book entitled “Please, Step Into My Office” by C.D. Rencher

Sigmund Freud developed the therapeutic technique known as Free Association; Free Association is where a patient reports their thoughts without reservation and makes no attempt to concentrate while doing so. Outside of a professional therapist office, in the author’s opinion, the bar setting is the next likeliest place where Free Association occurs. The author has met celebrities, people who work in extraordinary professions, and amazing every day people who have shared unsolicited glimpses of the people they are, the places they have been, and the things they have seen. The book is formatted as a collection of short stories, each with their own beginning, ending, and individual plot and theme. The one common denominator that permeates throughout the entirety of the book is the acquisition of knowledge and personal growth experienced by the author due to the encounters with the protagonist of each short story. The author hopes that the reader will find the book to be an easy read that is both entertaining and informative. So, with no further ado, Please, Step into my Office.

I told him what an interestingly awesome book this looked like and he replied “That’s my day job”. He actually wrote this book! After I asked him if he was sure I could get it on Amazon, he proceeded to tell me about some of the interesting celebrities he has met and some who turned out to be such jerks. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting Celester and our conversation. I was going to call it a night and cash out my tab and Celester asked me if I would be back tomorrow to which I replied I had a very very early morning flight so, no, but that I can’t wait to download his book. As I started to walk away, he called me back and shook my hand again and handed me a handful of typed pages and a bookmark paper clipped to it. He gave me a preview of his next book, which will be published the end of this summer and I must say, I am really looking forward to it.