Most of my clients become friends. This is a touchy subject (no pun intended originally, but now I like it) in the massage therapy area, as I’m sure it is in many others. We in the massage industry are often torn about how close to get to our clients, and also about massaging our friends. We want to help people. That’s why we do what we do. But sometimes people want to take things too far.

Maintaining a division between clients and friends is especially difficult on a small island, where we see everyone everywhere we go (at the post office, bank, beach, concert, restaurant, bar, driving through town, at the doctor’s office, attorney’s office, etc.) So people tend to know more about each other than is typical in places like the states.

Almost without exception, my clients ask me weekly, “When’s Peter going to open his restaurant?” I’m sure getting tired of that question, because I don’t know! I have hardly seen Peter in months. He’s busy, I’m busy.

There is one client in particular who frequently asks me what’s going on on St. Croix this week. It bothers me somewhat, because if someone lives here, they should be paying attention to what’s going on here. Anyway, when I massage her, she talks almost all the time. She will tell me what she’s done since we saw each other last week, and she’ll ask me what I’ve done. That’s cool with me. It’s her session and if she wants me to fill it up with words, fine.

A few weeks ago, I told her about the Greek dinner we had gone to at Dominique’s house. Peter’s chef is trying out recipes at weekly Greek dinners at the homes of some of his friends. It’s a good idea. It keeps Aaron working and making a little money while waiting for the restaurant to be ready. Anyway, that dinner was very disappointing in my opinion. I didn’t blog about it for this reason. But she asked me how it was and I told her that it was disappointing. Of course she wanted me to elaborate, so I did.

The meal started out with some delicious appetizers. I didn’t get to eat a lot of the appetizers because people were crowded around the counter and I was holding Goliath and a wine glass while trying to converse with all the cool people who were there. I think I got two bites of appetizer. I asked Aaron what he had prepared for us and he told me it was “Stuffed cabbage rolls similar to stuffed grape leaves” and that they were stuffed with rice and pork. Well I don’t usually eat pork, but I love stuffed grape leaves and I like rice and cabbage. So it sounded good.

We sat down to eat and we started out with a tiny bit of “salad”. My little bowl had a few pieces of iceburg lettuce, a slice of cucumber, a crumble of feta cheese and one small kalamata olive. Okay, hopefully the main course would be better. Well, I hate to say this, but it wasn’t. There was a pale leaf of cabbage stuffed with mostly white rice, sitting on a bed of more white rice. There was a spoonful of (red pepper?) sauce on top for added color and maybe flavor. But it didn’t really help. It was very bland. I ate the rice and the cabbage leaf, tried some of the filling and had the rest wrapped for Michael or the dogs to eat the next day. Dessert was a nice orange nut cake. It was good.

We had a good time at the dinner because of the company and the wine. The food did very little to add to my enjoyment of the evening. But Michael enjoyed it and ate my leftovers the next day.

My client paraphrased me, “So the food was tasteless and colorless”, and I said, “yes”. We sort of giggled when she said , “Tasteless and colorless, like an inert gas….” To me it was just very bland and a terrible example of the cuisine of a passionate colorful culture.

Peter saw this person at the parade in Frederiksted at the beginning of January. He mentioned his Greek dinners to her and (according to Peter) she said, “Oh no! Terry said they’re absolutely horrible”. This was after I had described the second one we attended the following week as “much better”. One of the appetizers was spanakoita, which I adore, the salad was much more interesting with spinach and red onion, and the main course was a flavorful eggplant dish (moussaka?). Dessert was excellent. But did this client mention that? Maybe, but “Terry said it was absolutely horrible”! was what he said she said. So apparently she is not interested in going to one of his dinners, or maybe she’s upset because she was not invited to the earlier ones. And from what he said after that he doesn’t seem to care if she comes to a dinner or not. I can’t know. But I feel bad because I’m in the middle of it.

In any case, she also had a disappointing dining experience at a famous local restaurant at around the same time. She went with her man friend and some house guests, to Kendrick’s Restaurant. She complained that her lamb was tasteless as was her friend’s duck. I find that very interesting, and it makes me want to go there to see if that was an anomaly, or if the food is going down hill at this establishment. But that’s just me. I said that, maybe the chef was having an “off night”, since Kendricks has been highly esteemed for many years.

Another example of this person’s callousness occurred just after I had my miscarriage. She suggested that we have my daughter (with her healthy uterus) carry a baby for Michael and me. Can you believe it?

Tags: St. Croix

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 7:23 am and is filed under St. Croix, Terry Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.