It was 1995. Gabe and I had been married for nine years. We had
started Culinary Clyde's packaged prepared Middle Eastern food products
and were in over 100 health food store. We had cultivated live music
night at the restaurant for ten years. We had been the official food
vendors for almost every belly dance festival in the San Francisco Bay
Area. Now, he was gone. I wasn't able to give him a child that he
could bring home to his mother, and his mother had since passed away. I
felt thrown away, like a piece of trash, unable to produce what he
wanted most.
For a year, with the help and support of
mother, I kept Culinary Clyde's on the market shelves. I tried running
the restaurant by myself, but it was difficult. I had taken the last
two months before Gabe left and learned how to cook the menu recipes,
but running the restaurant was about more than cooking. I struggled day
after day, week after week, month after month to keep the restaurant
doors open. I had no financial help from Gabe, and so all the expenses
in running a restaurant were left to me.
One day, while I was doing some chores in the
restaurant, a familiar face showed up at my door and asked to be
seated. I looked into the eyes of this familiar face and felt a
connection to my past, and I let him in. Little did I know then just how much my life would be changed by inviting him into the restaurant that day. It was early 1996.
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