There’s something about springtime that compels me to remember my youth. It’s remarkably hackneyed to have these remembrances, and I try to shove them off, knowing that they’re empty, knowing that they’re shells of memories that ought to be tinged with a sadness of what’s been lost. In the end, I fight off that urge to remember the whole and embrace the part that my mind asks me to recapture. I throw off the fringes of the memory that taint the innocence of the image I hold in my head.
I remember Sunday mornings with my mother, hurrying off to church and wearing shoes I only wore once a week. Sitting in the choir loft, tucked close to her, enfolded as the preacher went on, still stuck to the pew as my mother and the rest of the choir stood in their robes, their music surrounding me as much as my mother’s arm had during the sermon. Going to brunch after with friends of hers, digging into pancakes and bacon, sipping on coffee when she wasn’t looking, building towers out of the unused creamers. Getting home and slipping off my dress shoes and being reminded to take off my nice pants before heading out with friends to play in the streets or in a park. Coming home, muddied, bruised and exhausted, my mother forestalling homework to sit on the couch with her and enjoy the last moments of the weekend.
I remember working with my father, on the weekends I wasn’t in church, climbing into his truck and bouncing in my seat as we careened down tree-lined back roads. Smoke filled the cabin, and my father sang in a rough voice, octaves lower than what came out of the radio, but he found it fun to sing anyway, perhaps more so because I cringed as he did. Falling out of the door, high off the ground, him picking me up and dusting me off as we walked toward some half-finished addition he was working on. I crawled under a sink or into a closet to string wire or hold a length of pipe, my father still singing in a voice so deep it hardly sounded like singing. At one, the baseball game would be turned on and my father stopped singing. The hammering and the sawing and the everything happened at the pace of the game. After a few hours, my father and I would sit in the bed of the truck, facing the site, his eyes passing over what he had done and what was yet to be done, every Sunday taking inventory of his life’s work, the late innings of the game in our ears as we ate sandwiches.
I don’t mistreat these memories by remembering how much those shoes ached or how heavy the pipes were, how long the sermons dragged or how cramped it was under the sink. My mind draws me to those times because they are the childhood I want to bring with me into adulthood. To sully them with the impertinent whines of a child, to steal from myself what little purity remains of my childhood, is a way of telling me I’ll never be happy, I’ll never be satisfied. I want to always remember that moment when, as the sun went down, I sat on the tailgate of my father’s truck, surveying a completed staircase, and he said: We built this, you and me, and it wouldn’t be there if we hadn’t done it. Then he handed me his can of beer and I took a sip before handing it back as I imagined all adults did, wiping my mouth with my sleeve.
I hated it.
But this week’s drink is about my childhood memories, my afternoons at a worksite or on the back porch or couch, sneaking a pop at a family reunion or just being handed a can because I was sitting with the adults as the afternoon turned to night and what did it really matter in the grand scheme of things. This week’s drink is that crappy lager your family drinks at every gathering.
There’s not much to say about its taste or its provenance. Drinking it or ordering it isn’t going to blow the doors off a potential suitor or business associate. But, at the end of a week like I’ve had, there’s nothing more I want than to be surrounded by the comforting familiarity of what I grew up having at hand (or in every adult’s hand). We talk about peasant food, about comfort food and all these other culinary reminders of that simpler time, when we were children and didn’t know what anxiety and care were—or were consumed by the (pre)adolescent versions of such. But rarely do we admit to ourselves that the foam off a Budweiser, the pale yellow of a Yuengling, the sound of a can of PBR being popped serves just as well as any mac and cheese or meatloaf recipe might to take us back to the ease and shelter of our earliest days.
Drinking can be about expanding our horizons and discovering exactly who we are and who we want to be. It can be a way for us to glimpse new things about ourselves and how much we’ve changed. But it can also be a way for us to go back in time and remember who we were and where we’ve come from. Drinking needn’t always be some adventure filled with uncertainty, it can also be a way back to a place we’d left long ago.
I had a really shit week this week. I didn’t want adventure, or complexity, or anything that even required thought. I wanted something that would bring me back to those evenings, walking into the house trailing dirt and blood or sitting on a tailgate covered in dust. I wanted something that reminded me of security, of innocence, of family, of a time long since past but never forgotten, so long ago that whatever bad taste that might have lingered has fled in the years that slipped between.
I drank shitty beer all week, not as some hipster statement that I couldn’t be bought nor because I wanted to show that I wasn’t some snob when it came to booze, but because I wanted to know that, however fleetingly, it was possible to go home again, to simply be in the world without having to worry about everything that went on in it.
So, this weekend, think about what you used to see on the porches or living rooms of your childhood. Think about what used to get passed around as the game droned on in the background. Don’t be ashamed of where you came from. Don’t try to bring in the sad edges of the memory. Just grab some of it and try to find some peace.
Cheers.
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