Free Beer

Though my linage includes bloodlines from varied and well spaced parts of Europe and North America, the two primary parts of my particular family tree are Scottish and Irish. As my father once told me, “That means that half of me wants to get drunk but the other half doesn’t want to pay for it.” I can be a bit of a tightfist, or as I prefer to think of it, “frugal”.

This may lead you to think that you could find me haunting the halls at the Big Box-Mart buying the 50 pound bag of industrial coca/spackle, but you’d be wrong. I can’t stand the giant cube-building shopping centers that seem to be just about unavoidable these days and will do just about anything short of burning the contents of my pockets to keep my money away from them and to a mom&pop. It’s not just that most big box stores like Mall-Wart don’t support domestic manufacturing (which the decidedly DON’T). For me, it’s that I have watched with great sadness, what they do to our downtowns. They turn them into ghost towns.

In my city, we are blessed with a very vibrant downtown and though the picturesque setting and beautiful old buildings mean that we are neck deep in flocks of clueless tourists all summer, it’s still a blast to walk around in. In and amongst the various kitsch shops selling base ball hats with fake moose poop on them or fish markets selling lobster meat for $129.95 an ounce, there’s a little beer and wine shop… and they are fantastic. The owner is often the one behind the counter, they have very low employee turnover and the staff KNOWS what they are selling and can recommend to you items that you may not have considered. I love that.

I’ve become a regular there and stop in about once a week if not more. They know me by sight if not by name. I have a thing for really good micro-brewed beer and am particularly fond of some small label German beers that are unusual to see in the States. Being the top notch place that they are, they almost always have them stocked and cold. They’ve even kept specific beers in the fridge just for me, because I once asked if they had any already chilled. They’re like that. I like them a lot and we’ve had some good beer geek chats.

Today, I went in and picked up a six of one of my favorites and a four pack of ginger beer to make dark and stormies with over the weekend. The store has a fantastic selection of beers, wines and hard stuff and since it finally got pretty warm this afternoon, it made me pause at the cooler and think about those wonderful wheat beers that go so well on a warm summer day; hefeweizen’s. When I got to the counter, I asked if they had a hefeweizen by the name of UFO, brewed by Harpoon [brewery].

“Sorry, we don’t normally stock it. But if you’d like, I’ll special order some and keep it cold for you?”

(I love being a regular!)

“Sure. I’ll buy it if you get it!”

Then the guy asked if I’d tried another local brewery’s hefeweizen. When I told him that I couldn’t recall if I’d tried it, he took me over to the beer fridges and pulled a bottle out of a six pack to show me. The label looked familiar but I told him that I couldn’t remember how I liked it. With out a blink he closed the cooler door and handed me the beer.

“Here, you want to take this one? Maybe you can stick it in a pocket or something?”

I had a lot of stuff in my hands. I was carrying a six pack, a four pack, my lunch bag and my rain coat, plus a back back slung over one shoulder.

“Um… Yah! I’ll figure out some place to stow a free beer!”
“Good man. Id be worried about you if you turned it down.”, he added with a smile.

So, I walked out of the store with my purchased and free beer, happy as a… well, a guy with a free beer! They could have been assured of my continued patronage even with out the freebee but after that, they have pretty much got a customer for life.

It cost the owner one beer but what he got in return was a happy customer who’s going to steer people his way for a long time to come. At Big Box Mart, no manager would have dared a strategy like that. He most likely would have been fired or sent to the eastern slave citys to sew 5XL size briefs as punishment. It costs me more to shop at the independent stores, probably something like 10% more, but you know what? For service like that, I’ll happily buy 10% less stuff so I can afford to shop where I want to.

By the way… The Hefeweizen was good, but I like the Harpoon version better. Glad he’s getting some for me. I’ll be in next week.

You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out, Kid. Part III

This was a tense moment for me.

I immediately looked at my Dad, half expecting him to object or refuse it for me. He looked stern, but said nothing.

“You want to try it out?” Grandpa asked. You can guess my answer.

Dad left me alone with my Grandfather that afternoon and I learned to shoot. My very first shot was almost a bulls eye and from that point on, I was totally hooked. We had a great time shooting in Grandma and Grandpa’s back field and I could hardly believe that I was shooting, not only a real rifle, but MY real rifle. I was in heaven.

At the end of the day, my father came to pick me up and take us home. The deal was that for now, the rifle would stay at their house. We lived in a city anyway and there was no place to shoot at home. Grampa had set up his own range on his property, after all. That, and I think Mom would have passed out if we brought it home at this point.

On the way home, I asked Dad the obvious question. I was almost afraid to ask, lest I jinx the dream, but I had to know. “How come you wouldn’t let me get a BB gun but a real rifle is okay?”

“That’s simple.” he replied. “Because it’s a REAL rifle. Not a toy. You will learn how to respect a real fire arm and never confuse it with something to play with. If I feel like you can treat it with respect and show me that you know how to handle it properly, then that day, you can bring it home.”

As always, he was a man of his word. One day I did bring it home and it stayed in my closet in my bed room. I knew with out a doubt that if I EVER got it out with out permission then it would go away forever. I never once wanted to test him on that and so I never showed it to friends or played with it. It was a real rifle, after all. Not a toy.

I still have the rifle my Grandfather got me. He had bought it at a second hand store and had fixed it up him self. He had reblued the metal and refinished the stock and it still looks wonderful. He died only two years later and I miss shooting with him still. When I got to the range, I feel him there with me. He was a gun collector and aficionado. It skipped a generation. Dad couldn’t care either way but I have the bug. I am the proud steward of the small collection of Grandpa’s rifles and pistols and keep them clean and safe. Some day I’ll take Short Stack and Lulu Bell, when the time’s right. I’ll show them the rifle that Great-Grandpa gave me and I’ll teach them to shoot just like he did.

Until then. It’s usually just me alone at the range. Alone other than Grampa, that is.

Who needs BB’s when you can go “BANG” for real?

You’ll shoot your eye out, Kid. Part II

I figured that since I seemed to have the trust of my folks, this wouldn’t be an impossible sell. Hard, I was sure, but not impossible. I scoped out the toy store and found what I wanted. I gathered all the particulars: price, availability, safety goggles, specs and formed my case for getting it in my mind. I waited for the right moment to make my plea. A few months before my next birthday was perfect. Not to late, so that they would have already bought presents but not too early either, so that they might forget.

I would be turning 10 and I thought that I was ready for such an item. The moment was finally ripe and ready to pick and I walked up to my parents like a lawyer before the Supreme Court and stated my case. I laid it all out as matter-of-factly as possible. To my horror, my dad (who had just recently finished out his time in the military and attained the rank of platoon sergeant) barely looked up from his news paper and stated flatly, “No way. Not a chance.”

I was dumbfounded. I figured that it would be Mom that would throw up road blocks, not Dad! I knew that he had grown up shooting real guns on the farm when he was younger than I was. He had been IN the military, for Pete’s sake! I was astonished that he would not even take the subject up for debate.

My father is a very good man. He can be goofy and playful. He’s always honest and will do what ever he can to help when ever possible, but… BUT, when he says “no”, that was the end of the discussion. Zero room to wiggle was given and I learned early on that to push it was a fruitless move that only brought trouble. All I was left with was to ask why in the most non-whiny way possible. He looked me in the eye and said, “It’s too much like a toy, but it’s not a toy. It’s almost a gun, but not quite. People treat them too lightly and I don’t want you to have the temptation and underestimate what it can do. You can’t have one. I’m sorry. End of story.”

Crushed, I went on with my plastic cap guns and tried not to linger too much in front of the BB gun display at the toy store. I wanted one so bad that it hurt. I can still remember the longing and I will forever feel a special kinship with Ralphie from “A Christmas Story”. The only difference was that he GOT his Red Rider BB Gun. I never would. I could bank on that.

The next few months rolled by and my birthday came and went. I’m sure I got some neat stuff, but I honestly don’t recall what. A week or so later, Dad and I went on a road trip to visit his folks, my Grandma and Grandpa. They lived about two hours away and since they didn’t drive too much and both my folks worked, we didn’t see them all that often. Visits were always special and I remember them fondly, filled to the brim with cigarette smoke, coffee mugs and a huge german shepherd named King, who, though friendly, scared the hell out of me.

We came in and gave out hugs and had some lunch. After the plates were cleared, my Grandfather stood up and told me to follow him to living room. When we got there, he reached behind a warn chair and pulled out… a rifle. A .22, single shot, bolt action rifle, to be specific. He opened the bolt to make sure it was empty and handed it to me, telling me to keep it pointed at the ceiling. Never having seen a real gun other than those carried by policemen, I was in awe and held it like it was made of glass and diamonds.

A REAL rifle! “That’s really neat”, I said, or something approximately goofy.

“It’s for you.”, he replied.

My eyes must have been the size of dinner plates.

*Last bit tomorrow*

You’ll shoot your eye out kid!

My folks were very good to me and as an only child, I had the chance to do things that most kids never did. I traveled, I got a lot of one on one attention and I because I was a good kid and rarely got into mischief, I was often left on my own recognizance and thus, got to make a lot of decisions for my self. I was used to being given a lot of slack, because I pretty much never abused it.

There was one area that was not up for debate though, particularly with my mother. No guns. I didn’t have any toy guns for most of my early years and my folks wouldn’t get me any. This was back in the day when parents actually controlled what their kids had for possessions. If I had any money of my own, it was in my little savings book or in my piggy bank and, for all I knew, might as well not exist at all. Kids, little kids anyway, simply did not have money to buy toys on there own. If a “big kid” had some money that he or she had made racking lawns or washing cars or some such thing, anything purchased with that money had to be cleared by the parentals first. It seemed that there were very, very few exceptions to this.

So… back to guns. No guns in the toy box for me meant one thing and one thing only. Everything was a gun. Now, I’m not a violent person and was really not an aggressive kid at all. If anything, I over empathized with situations, people and what ever. When something got hurt, be it animate or inanimate, it really bothered me, still does in fact. I was no cry baby, but I was the kid rescuing the toad from the jerks with the sticks and fire crackers. I didn’t do “mean”. This made my fascination with guns all the more perplexing to my Mom, but there it was. A stick in the yard would be made into a gun. A yardstick held up to a shoulder would become a rifle and failing having something to make a gun out of, fingers and thumbs would be transformed into six shooters. BANG!

The breaking point for Mom was the day I bent a coat hanger in the approximate shape of an pistol, used an entire roll of masking tape to cover it and then used black shoe polish to make it the right color. That was the day I finally got to have toy guns. The savings in masking tape alone would make it worth while. So, I got to have the toy guns but my eyes soon fixed on a new passion. Something more then just pointing a plastic toy and yelling “Bang”..

I wanted a BB gun.

More later…

Holy men and Humor

I have a good friend who I’ve known for many years now. He’s a great guy, as is his family and I only wish we still lived in the same area. Back when I lived in New Hampshire the two of us used to get together fairly frequently and waste hefty amounts of time enjoying bizarre and eclectic movies or quizzing each other about ridiculous minutia of dubious fact. We both have a particular love of the obscure, and if you can serve that obscurity up with nice, big side dishes of history and silliness, so much the better. We’ve had a lot of fun trying to “out bizarre” each other with strange and edifying material collected from the bottom of old, moldy trunks, long forgotten in half collapsed barns. Needless to say, I always enjoy getting email from him. For this blog, I’ll refer to him simply as “Number 6” for reasons that make perfect sense to me and anyone else who knows him. I’ve been keeping an eye out for a black blazer with white trimmed lapels for him but so far, no luck.

It was Number 6 who emailed me the link to “The Elders” web site. He also sent me a picture, titled “A Couple of Real Jokers”. The photo was taken at a discussion involving not only the Dali Lama, but also the Bishop, Desmond Tutu. In the picture, The Dali Lama is pointing at Bishop Tutu in a conspiratorial kind of way and both are laughing. I have profound respect for these two men and would have LOVED to be in the audience, or at the very least, watched it on TV. I think the predominant reason that I like these two individuals so much is their sense of humor and humility, not to mention the honor in which they live their lives.

Now here’s the thing. I have great respect for these two public figures. Number 6 however, sent me the picture with the question, “What do you suppose was so funny?”, and this is where my brain switches to “default” mode. For me, “default” is “silly mode”. High brow it’s not, but my instant reaction was…

I couldn’t resist.

What I hope… and I think I’m right here, is that the two honorable gentlemen in question would find it funny too. I like to think they would…

I would, anyway.