A Literary Feast

Pumpkin King: Searching For the Perfect Fall Brew

Posted on October 22nd, 2012

My least favorite thing about the passing of yet another pizza oven summer is all the people who, regardless of how little they know you, will immediately volunteer how upset they are over the coming rains and trench coat weather. Apparently, the secret to happiness is a wardrobe of shorts, the incessant simultaneous hum and dripping of thousands of air conditioners, and the (imagined) benefits of spending the day roasting in Coney Island. It takes all of me not to say, if that’s your idea of a good life, why don’t you move to Florida? We have seasons here and we like it that way.

 

My favorite things? I’ll spare you the poetic praise of autumn chill, foliage and sweaters and get right to the seasonal beer; specifically, the pumpkin beers that one September day suddenly appear on the row of your local bar’s tap handles. Available only for a couple of months leading up to (and occasionally past) Halloween, these beers are anticipated by any drinker who loves everything with pumpkin as the star ingredient. I am one of those people. When I was a kid, my mother sometimes made me sweet pumpkin puree that I would consume with a spoon, and that’s how it began. Pumpkin cheesecake, bread, muffins, beer – you almost can’t go wrong with that fruit, as far as I’m concerned.

 

Pumpkin beer wasn’t always the trendy drink that it is today. Until fairly recently, only a few breweries took their pumpkin ales seriously, and you could count on very few places in New York City to dependably serve them each fall. With the proliferation of seasonals and microbrews, and the general rise of beer to the upper echelons of the alcoholic beverage kingdom, the varieties of pumpkin beer seem to have exploded. But all beer was not created equal. (Well, maybe Bud, Coors and Miller were.) Niche pumpkin brews run the gamut from sweet and heavy to crisp with barely detectable fruit notes. In an attempt to zero in on the best varieties, I set out to test the available pumpkin beers in and around Brooklyn.

 

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My search began in a somewhat unlikely place and at first yielded a discouraging result. On one of the first cardigan-worthy days of autumn, I took my girlfriend to Staten Island, mostly for the ferry ride that she hadn’t experienced before. Once there, we walked around the area. The St. George neighborhood by the ferry hadn’t changed much in the seven or so years since I was there last. Despite some condos and a bar or restaurant here and there, the area retains a spooky vibe, with unsavory-looking characters lurking in the spaces between buildings and at bus stops. Its most famous bar/restaurant is 120 Bay Café (formerly Cargo Café); if you’re a St. George hipster, this is where you probably end up once or twice a week. The bar itself is well kept, with a back room for music, nice staff, pretty good bar food and a decent beer list.

 

120 Bay’s seasonal offering this year is Saranac Pumpkin Ale; the waiter informed us that they just got it in, for the first time ever. The beer is light-bodied and crisp, with an autumnal hue and slightly sour notes. Unfortunately, it does not taste like pumpkin at all: there is no heft to it, no sweetness whatsoever; even the scent is a bit thin. Par for the course, I suppose, as Saranac have yet to impress me. Of all the beers in this article, this is the one to skip.

 

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Heartland Brewery gastropubs are Manhattan mainstays, with the Union Square location the oldest, busiest and best known. They have also become popular tourist and commuter destinations – not a good thing, if your image screams heartland authenticity. However, their signature beers, available on tap only in their establishments, can be quite excellent, and the seasonal pumpkin beers were among the best we found. They also pleasantly surprised us by offering two very distinct pumpkin options, the much-advertised Smiling Pumpkin Ale and the oak aged Imperial Pumpkin Ale.

 

Smiling Pumpkin Ale, my girlfriend’s favorite of the two, is a medium-bodied brew described on the menu as containing “citrus and wildflower aromas… honey-roasted pumpkins… simmered with ginger, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg.” That pretty much covers everything you expect in a good pumpkin beer, and this one isn’t too heavy if you’d like more than a couple of glasses.

 

My own preference is for the Imperial Pumpkin Ale, which tastes like it sounds: a heavy, not too dark in color beer with a very distinct, somewhat sour pumpkin taste; the menu mentions “bold pumpkin and rum.” This is the sort of brew your taste buds conjure when someone says “craft beer.” Between the two pumpkin offerings, we left satisfied. Sometimes, you don’t need to seek out the road less traveled to get what you were looking for.

 

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The Globe, a dark, very spacious bar on 23rd Street near 3rd Avenue, suffers from one setback: location. I say it is a setback not for lack of patronage: on weekends, it’s reportedly a Blahnik-clad riot. But it does find itself near the long frat parade stretch of 3rd Avenue, where bouncers are forced to demand IDs from anyone who looks to be under 75. Even on a relatively quiet Wednesday night, a suited up gentleman – too inebriated to even stand up properly – came into my line of vision stumbling backwards and bouncing off the bar before crashing on the floor, while his female companion clapped and hooted. The two saving grace factors were my friend, who works in the area (my reason for ending up there) and their seasonal beer, which happens to be pumpkin ale.

 

The beer has no name; the bartender said it is The Globe’s own ale, and when I tried to pry further, he said it is brewed “by Lionshead”; but The Lion Brewery does not have a pumpkin beer, so the trail went cold there. However, the medium-bodied ale is very praise-worthy: well balanced and not too sweet, its crisp taste loaded with just enough pumpkin flavor. It is actually in many ways on par with Heartland’s Smiling Pumpkin. Should you find yourself if the neighborhood, stop in just for a pint or two, atmosphere be damned.

 

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Back in the relative safety of Brooklyn’s Park Slope, Commonwealth – an indie rock-themed not-quite-dive with a back yard, a Dinosaur Jr. tour poster on the wall, two pinball machines, popcorn, WiFi, and a jukebox consisting entirely of owner and staff selections (Pavement! Uncle Tupelo! The Get Up Kids’ cover of The Cure’s “Close To Me”!) – slings Smuttynose Pumpkin Ale. As I approached the bar, I heard the bartender complain to another patron about “all the fruit and nut beers” on tap; when he turned to me, I blurted out, “I’ll take one of those fruit and nut beers!”

 

As fruit beers go, you could do worse than Smuttynose Pumpkin – if your yardstick is Saranac. A medium-bodied ale so hoppy, you might take it for an IPA, (and admittedly, I am usually not an IPA drinker,) the beer came across as utterly mediocre; and while I can highly recommend the bar, I won’t do the same for its choice of pumpkin brew.

 

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In Brooklyn’s post-industrial Gowanus neighborhood, Lowlands Bar holds court. The bar is usually uncrowded, even on weekends, although a sizeable score of patrons has been known to show up when it hosts musicians playing folk and bluegrass. (It’s not exactly a show, more of a down-home jam session.) There is a charming back yard, WiFi and a stellar selection of beers, including the Southern Tier Imperial Pumking [sic] Ale.

 

Imperial Pumking is pure joy, if you like your pumpkin ale a little heavy, sweet – almost cake-like – and spicy with a hint of apple. The taste is full-on pumpkin, with more of the fruit’s flavor packed in than in any of the other beers mentioned above. It is currently by far my favorite pumpkin beer, and I always get a pint, while it’s available, when I go to Lowlands to write or work on websites. (Anecdotally, a very good friend of mine who is the biggest beer snob I know – I say this lovingly – recommended Southern Tier to me on a separate occasion; certainly, two refined palates can’t be wrong!)

 

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Food and drink criticism is not objective work. We can speak with certainty of factors like presentation, service, precision of what’s promised on the menu vs. what exits the kitchen on a plate, and physical ingredients; everything else is ultimately subject to palates and preferences. (Someone who likes IPAs, for instance, will probably have a higher opinion of the Smuttynose than I do.) Keep this in mind as you seek out these and other varieties for yourself and build your own list of autumn favorites.

 

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The Most Powerful Hour

Posted on October 22nd, 2012

I guess I can’t remember exactly how it all started. I’m pretty sure one of us suggested it as a joke, probably on some hot, bored Los Angeles day. (There were a lot of those, in our early twenties.) Someone joked about it and we laughed, but at some point we must have stopped laughing. Because someone eventually went out to buy the beer, and someone else collected the shot glasses from the kitchen.

 

There are four of us, at the core – me, my husband, and our best couple of friends – plus other members of one of our groups of friends from college (a group of people all somehow connected to our alma mater’s elite choral group, either directly or through our significant others – let’s be clear here about what kind of nerdy, conscientious, well-rounded people we are). We are people who enjoy good beer, I swear. We go to microbreweries! European-style beer gardens! We buy growlers and order tasting flights, like beer lovers are supposed to do, as part of our responsibilities as good Beer Connoisseurs. We lead fairly quiet, responsible lives, enjoy intellectual conversation, and read good books. Many of us are married or are in steady long-term relationships, and many of us plan to have children. We have fully accepted the weightiness of adulthood, I assure you, and we generally act accordingly. But we semi-regularly and with great fervor enjoy drinking a shot of cheap beer every minute for a full hour*, and we are not ashamed.

 

When we have a good occasion to do so, we set ourselves up with some snacks and a case of cheap, canned beer. It’s generally cheap, canned light beer, which pains me to admit, but the lightness of it turns out to be incredibly important should one still want to be able to do anything productive somewhere in the vicinity of the rest of the day – including things like preparing or procuring a meal, which is important to do after the most powerful of hours. And in any case, we’re out for enjoyment – an admittedly juvenile sort of enjoyment, but not obliteration.

 

Before we begin, we set up one of a number of methods for musical accompaniment, all methods specifically designed for pairing with this activity – a computer program that plays a minute each of songs in an iTunes playlist, a variety of websites that provide power hour playlists with minute-long clips of songs (90s playlists are vastly preferred to all others), or, one time, a video playlist of minute-long clips of music videos from our middle school years (sadly disappointing and quickly deemed vastly inferior to other methods). If we’re inside, we cover the table or the floor with some sort of liquid-resistant tablecloth or plastic. We claim our spots in chairs or on the rug, in a circle. We make sure we have an unencumbered route to a bathroom or other necessary locations, since everything that needs to happen away from the circle of friends must happen within a minute-long interval. We remind everyone to burp when they feel the need, and to drink water when they can. We confirm the volume of each of what is usually a motley assortment of shot glasses, making sure everyone knows how much they’re actually drinking each minute. This is how responsible adults do a power hour.

 

I’m a 28-year-old, married, professional, responsible woman, and I power hour for fun.

 

Here’s how it usually goes: The first fifteen minutes or so go slowly. We chat idly about normal things, as if we were sitting at a bar or around a dinner table. Sometimes we absentmindedly take sips from our shot glasses even when the minute hasn’t changed. Around minute 20, the engine begins to rev and conversation becomes louder and faster. Usually about now is when it starts to slowly dawn on you that taking another 40 shots of beer will be a serious undertaking. We start talking about how much we love doing power hours. Inevitably, someone asks, “Will we still do power hours when we have kids?” So far, the answer is always “of course!” (We have no idea what it will be like to have children, it should be noted.) Somewhere near minute 40 is when time begins to fold in on itself, those minutes that seemed like eons back at minute 10 now speeding by like telephone poles along a highway. The pile of empty cans grows at comical speed. Conversation becomes less linear, more chaotic.

 

At minute 60, the group has a serious decision to make. Will we continue drinking? There is a short mourning period at the end of each power hour, as the intensity of the previous hour comes to an abrupt end and as we yet again realize the downside of the power hour: many hours of drinking have been condensed into one, the desired effect coming more quickly (likely the intention of whichever desperate college student originally designed the simple-yet-effective game) but the enjoyable act of drinking with friends unfortunately shortened. Usually, most group members nurse another beer or two over the next many hours, as we enjoy the lingering power hour afterglow and settle into the rest of our afternoon or evening.

 

It’s been about five years since we started doing power hours, and every time is better than the last. The first few years we did it every six months or so because … well, because there was no reason not to. (Still valid justification for doing just about anything, in one’s early twenties.) We were still loopy with that sense that we were out in the world for the first time in our lives, and no one could stop us from engaging in structured ways to get drunk on cheap beer. But after a few years, things became more difficult. People started moving away, including one of our core four and then my husband and I, and even before then all of our schedules filled up with work and school and all of this “being an adult” business. Our extended group became more and more scattered across the country, none of us with quite enough money or power to make it possible for us all to get together regularly (meaning: most of us are or have recently been graduate students). So we do power hours when some number of us is together, maybe a few times each year, if we’re lucky. We do it to celebrate being together and we do it because it is undeniably one of the most fun things we do (we do other things for fun too, don’t worry). We’ve done power hours in our living rooms, in our yards, in vacation rentals, and one time over Skype, with a friend doing research in Hawaii.

 

An outsider might say our power hour tradition is some sort of vigil to our college years – four years of living, working, and playing (partying) in close proximity to one another, in semi-isolated bliss – and I might not necessarily disagree, but the funny truth is that most of us (me included) had never done a power hour until we started this tradition, a few years after graduating. We may pine for our younger days, but we are not trying to recreate them. Life was pretty great then, but life is pretty great now, too (especially with a case of beer behind us).

 

I’m not sure if we’ll do power hours forever. When I’m honest with myself I know we won’t. But I hope we’ll try, for as long as we’re able. Maybe I’ll be the crazy old woman your kids tell you about, who has her other old lady and old gentlemen friends over to drink cheap beer out of shot glasses. I suppose that sounds kind of awesome, when I think about it. But even if we’re not doing power hours, I certainly hope I’ll still have these friends, and that we’ll still be having this much fun together.

 

* Otherwise known as a “power hour” – perhaps because of how mighty you feel after completing one, but far more likely because of how fairly quickly it causes you to experience the power of the all-mighty brew. 

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Terms of Enbeerment: Towards A Lexicon of Beery Sayings

Posted on October 22nd, 2012

Gentle reader:

Herein find a selection of beer-wit happily recalled over the course of a long week end when the author’s wife was out of town. I present them here in an order which reflects the same discipline that guided my choice of beers to sample between the years 1978 and 1982. I make no claims as to their origins, just that I know I heard them someplace.

Clear as beer piss: self-evident; abundantly clear, metaphorically referring to the near lack of color in urine produced after drinking more than a six pack.

Beer Goggles: metaphorical; relating to changes in judgment concerning physical beauty and sexual attraction of potential human bed partners resulting from the ingestion of mass quantities of beer. As in: “Zounds, Vandelay! You seemed to have brought that homely inflatable doll home from the Throckmorton’s party last night. I’d say you must have donned your beer goggles, what?”

Beerberg: the name given to the ice that sometimes forms and floats atop a frosty mug of beer. Not to be confused with “beerburg” which invariably refers to Munich Germany.

Bill Whooten Piss: Slang for a very fine, light lager produced in the same town claiming to be the birthplace of Bill Whooten, my college roommate: Latrobe Pennsylvania.

“I remember my first beer…” : Sarcasm, meant to denote a negative judgment about behavior seen as regrettable, ridiculous, foolish, sophomoric. What you would say if you came upon your friend while they were in the commission of an epic fail.

Beer belly: anatomical. The expansion of the waistline beyond all reasonable proportions in reference to the legs and upper torso caused by the accrual of fat due to ingestion of bucket loads of beer over the course of a decade or about 18 months in certain northern plain states.

Beer fart: metabolic. The drunken, sonorous, sometimes explosive and always – purposely – public passing of noxious gas that has less to do with digestive processes and their byproducts and more to do with changes in judgment concerning what constitutes humor.

“Like sex in a canoe:” sarcasm, possibly Cleesian in origin but purported to be an Australian commentary on the inferior quality of American beer: “It’s like sex in a canoe, mate – too close to water!”

Beer taxi: altered consciousness resulting in an imaginary mode of transport. After a night of heavy beer drinking waking up sprawled out on the floor of the Hammond Indiana bus terminal with no idea of how you arrived there: must have been the beer taxi!

Beertastrophe: 1 any accident or act of terrorism that results in the destruction of perfectly good beer. 2: judgment: term sometimes applied to mass-produced crap beers.

Beertard: someone who cannot tell the difference between a good beer and crap beer.

“Beer Tick” – entomological: the guy who, six beers into his evening, begins a series of repeated attempts to attach himself to any of the women present in a bar.

We welcome further additions to the growing (and necessary) Terms of Enbeerment Dictionary, forthcoming from Poor Choices Press Ltd.  Submissions may be written down on the backs of coasters and/or damp napkins and left in restrooms, to be collected at a future date.

 

Categories: Uncategorized

‘Lite’ Protection

Posted on October 22nd, 2012

If you drink enough beer, things that didn’t seem appealing in the starkly sober light of day, things that didn’t interest you in the least, start to become the focus of your inebriated obsessions. Things like hot pockets, toothpaste brands, the names of your kindergarten teacher’s twin sons. Things like pollen build-up along the curbs in the parking lot. Things like Mace.

When I was twenty one I lived in an ‘undesirable’ neighborhood. The kind of neighborhood where you could peek out your front window to see drug deals and old ladies smashing windshields to powder with a purse full of bricks. My roommate at the time was an oft-deployed infantryman who was extremely invested in the armed forces lifestyle. I would come home to find him lying on the living room floor wrapped in a gilly suit (an outfit designed to turn you into a pile of foliage) pressing bullets for his sniper rifle.

Before leaving for a tour of Iraq he put together a ‘home security kit’ for me. It contained, among other things, flares, a hunting knife, the largest flashlight I had ever seen, and a police strength canister of Mace. I squirreled these items away around the apartment per his instructions and promptly forgot about them until a muggy summer’s night a few months later.

That night me and my friend Alex were sitting on the back porch drinking cans from a case of black label and watching a group of people scream and shove each other in a dusty parking lot down below. As a gunshot cracked through the air we both jumped and looked at each other with wide eyes. Then, because beer makes fear brief and because no one appeared to have intercepted the bullet, we laughed it off and cracked open a fresh set of beers. He asked if I ever got nervous living in such a sketchy area and I explained to him that I had nothing to fear because of the ‘home security’ tools hidden around the house. He thought for a second and then said ‘You know… I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to get Maced…’

Three minutes later I was wedged tightly against the far wall of the kitchen aiming out the door to the porch where Alex was bracing himself against the railing. We figured if we got some good distance between us that he would get just a touch of the mist and be able to control how much of a ‘true riot experience’ he really wanted to have. I centered my shot on his drunkenly smiling face and jammed down the button.

Mace, it ends up, does not come out in a gentle cloud akin to hairspray. Instead it comes out in a thick, dark red jet. My aim was tragically true; instead of the cloudy haze that he could back in and out of to control the burn he got a high pressure jet straight to the face. His beer hit the floor and started to gush over the edge as he slapped his hands to his eyes and started shrieking. As I ran through the space between us my vision clouded as my own eyes and nose started to tingle and pour. I pulled his hands down to see that his lids were already swollen shut and wherever the liquid had made contact his skin was a livid shade of purple.

He was screaming and clawing at his face. He couldn’t stop. I tuned into drunken emergency mode and decided we needed some ouside assistance. I dialed the hospital a couple of miles down the road and told them that me and my friend had been mugged and Maced. While lying is unpleasant this seemed a little more dignified than having decided to spend the night lighting each others’ mucus membranes on fire. They told me to bring him right in. As we sped our way towards the E.R. he lolled his head out the window like a dog and begged me not to stop driving for anything because the breeze was keeping him alive. I guiltily obliged and whipped through the first red light we came to. Sirens blared and as I pulled over to the curb Alex popped from the car and began doing a pain dance on the sidewalk. I started to explain why I was driving like a maniac when the two officers caught sight of Alex’s flaming visage and said ‘Oh shit, you’re the kids who got Maced. Go head, get going!’.

When we arrived at the hospital the nurses catered to us with sympathtic cluckings, gave us juice, and flushed alex’s face out for the next hour while asking us all about the details of our attack. The combination of the attention and the eye wash station soothed his panic and we headed home. I shifted shamefully in my seat imagining how much pain he must still be in given that my nose was continuing to run like I had a chunk of wasabi lodged in it. Then I thought of a way to make it up to him.

‘You know..’ I said, ‘I have some flares at home we could play with….’

 

 

 

 

 

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Lovely Day for A Guinness

Posted on October 22nd, 2012

You never forget your first Guinness. How can you? Brown so deep it might be red, like looking into a bottomless pond where you worry about what’s swimming beneath your toes. A head of foam, thick and perfect as an ice cream float, that you puzzle over at first, wondering if you need to scoop it off with a spoon in order to reach the drink underneath. A true Guinness pint glass has the curve of a woman’s hips, and you hold it, cool and solid in your hands, and you think, “Now this, my friends, this is a real beer.” And you are afraid.

 

I drank my first Guinness in the most appropriate way possible: seated in a seedy pub on the outskirts of Dublin, on a wet January night in 1998. Fresh off the plane, I’d come to Ireland on a six-month student visa. I had a backpack, a passport, a wallet stuffed with traveler’s checks, and a bunk in a hot, noisy hostel down the street. The next morning, I’d get on a train that would take me across the width of the country to Galway, where I was ostensibly going to study Irish literature for a semester. Really, though, I’d come to learn to be Irish, beyond just the words. I wanted its music and its weather and its history, all the bogus tales of its magic to nest in my bones.

 

For now, though, I’d settle for its beer. I was wearing a fleece jacket, one of two pieces of clothing (the other being overly fastidious raingear) that I would later learn marked the American students from the Irish, with their long scarves and wool sweaters. In fact, there was a row of us newly-arrived Americans sitting at the bar on this rainy night, and we all looked like the rubes we were, children of Irish ancestors, naively reverse-migrating to this damp island in search of some essential kernel of romance or truth about our past lives as potato farmers or poets. The bartender asked us what we wanted to drink, and we all looked at each other, the dare passing between us, unspoken: a Guinness, please.

 

Let me pause here and set the scene of this country I’d landed in. Ireland in the winter of 1998 was an intake of breath held just before an outburst or a sigh, no one quite sure which would come out next. It was here that I discovered what the word “sectarian” meant, where I saw armed guards for the first time in the street, where I learned that the Catholicism I’d been raised with in the American Midwest was a pale orphan child compared to the heavy fist with which the church had ruled, until only recently, all aspects of Irish life. In the Republic, subdivisions nudged at the edges of castle ruins in cow pastures, signs of the economic resurgence about to slap the landscape with a bang, and up in the North, a peace treaty was being put together, behind closed doors and after so many painful decades, with Great Britain. All of Ireland seemed waiting for something to happen that winter, tiptoeing on the edge of the new millennium.

 

All of that came later, though. For the time being, there was just another kind of long wait – for a pint of Guinness, poured by the barkeep and left to settle behind the bar. Another thing you learn in Ireland: that all Guinnesses are not equal, because so much depends upon the skill of the pourer and his attention to your pint. The proper way to pour a Guinness requires patience and finesse. Hold the glass at an angle, the tap pulled towards the body, and the stout flows in until it just tickles the bottom of the glass’s bell curve. Then, the pint, three-quarters full, must be placed down gently to sit for a bit, to let the head float free from the dark, velvety body of the beer and settle at the top. This settling time is the most necessary part. It’s when you make eye contact with your pint for the first time, because you are sure that the bartender must have forgotten it sitting there so lonely under the tap. You gaze at it, wondering, and impatience and thirst start to swell your tongue, just as the beer’s creamy head gently lifts against the sides of the glass. You wait, and it waits, and time slows, the stout priming and the drinker lusting.

 

It’s a long minute before the bartender steps back and holds the Guinness up level to the tap. This time, the tap must be pushed away from the chest, and the pouring is deliberate and slow and aimed straight into the middle of the foam. To do otherwise is to invite a disaster hard to hide: the telltale dribble of foam staining the side of the glass like a wince or a bruise. The perfect ones, though, arrive with a head barely crested above the lip of the pint, a low cap of pale beige quivering over the rim. But now, set the glass down and wait again. Wait until the foam almost imperceptibly calms and quiets. Wait until the glass has a sheen like sweat. Wait until your conversation falters and stops. Only then may you sip.

 

And sip I did. I stepped into that Guinness gingerly, fearful that, like haggis or Vegemite, this might be a cultural condition I could not inhabit. But the first taste was smooth and almost milky, with a not unpleasant undercurrent of bitterness, and there was a satisfaction in the way it settled in the stomach like a meal. The Guinness warmed my tongue and shook loose the stiffness between us strangers. It was my first introduction into the Irish art of sitting, of pints slowly drained and stories slowly told and not much to do except the pleasant wait for the next pint to arrive.

 

I did a lot of waiting those next five months in Ireland. I waited for the rain to stop, for the gorse to bloom, to fall in love, to be fallen in love with, to write the perfect poem, to go back home. When the waiting was a solitary thing, I went to the café for coffee, to write and read or just gaze at the beautiful Irishmen with their sad eyes and elegant fingers. But I was never alone when I waited for a Guinness. At the pub on the banks of the narrow canal that emptied out into Galway Bay, we shouldered four-deep onto benches for epic conversations, cheese toasties, and bottomless pints. Over Guinness, love affairs bloomed and were discarded, friendships were tearfully toasted over, then broken later in fits of pique, and afternoons blurred into evenings and back into mornings. Out in the streets beyond the pub, the peace treaty was signed, Bill Clinton did not have sex with Monica Lewinsky, and I nearly failed modern Irish history. I guessed that those things mattered, but the real business seemed to be happening inside, between friends and strangers sharing a round.

 

It was all so cliché, my Irish life, that it transcended itself and looped right back around into authenticity. But who lives in Ireland and does not order a pint or two to ward off the perpetual chill and sit by the fire, a seisiun reeling through tunes in the corner by the door? After all, going to the pub for a Guinness is, as they say in Gaelic, good craic. Which does not mean exactly what you think it does – but it also kind of does, because drinking is the best kind of entertainment in a country where the wet, cold days vastly outnumber the sunny, warm ones. Every day in Ireland is a lovely day – for a Guinness, at least.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories: Uncategorized

Da White Pint: A Ghost Story

Posted on October 22nd, 2012

Through a series of accidents, most of them intentional, I once found myself alone on a sparsely populated island a little ways north of the 60th parallel. I had survived for a month on other people’s muesli, withered green peppers, and an occasional bean-and-macaroni pie, but I was none the worse for it. The almost interminable daylight filled me with a bustling chemical energy that made food seem irrelevant. And drink—drink felt like a thing intended for another species. Giddy from the subarctic summer, my brain was drunk almost constantly on salt and latitude. For a month almost nothing stronger than well water touched my tongue. A dram of whisky once at a school regatta. A perplexing glass of sake at an equally perplexing late-night sing-a-long of classic country tunes. Otherwise—water. In pints, in bottles, in glasses and in teacups. An old man eyed me askance at a bar in Lerwick as I gulped a half liter of water without coming up for air. “You have a great thirst,” he said.

 

I hadn’t expected this. I’d thought I was traveling to a land of flagons filled with strong ale, rowdy men in mead halls, maybe rare liquors that one set fire to before imbibing. When my family learned that I was bound for Shetland—midway between Scotland and Norway, battered by the North Sea to the east and the open Atlantic to the west—they showered me with every variety of Scotch available in 50ml samples at the state liquor store, so that I would be an educated northern drinker upon arrival. Back in New England, each little bottle burst with cloudy light, heathery, boggy, smoky, salty. But in Shetland, among the heather and the salt and the smoke from peat fires, I looked back on every sip like a cheap imitation of this otherworldly place where the air itself tasted better than any whisky.

 

Unst, the northernmost of the Shetland Islands, has a ghost. She appears rarely, once or twice in twenty years and generally in the passenger seat of a moving vehicle. I set out with a tent, some minimal vittles, and several liters of water to have an overnight adventure out on the moors somewhere. My plans were vague. Look at birds. Talk to seals. Try not to run out of provisions. Wander around with no particular destination. But as it happened, I crossed paths with a fellow fiddle player in the tiny town of Uyeasound. We ate bean-and-macaroni pies, swapped music stories, chatted, the sort of visiting you do in a small island town.

 

Then he told me: a few month ago he had seen her. Da White Wife—the ghost of Unst. His story was like all the others. Late at night. One minute he was driving alone. The next minute she was there, ghostly, glowing. She was old. Her teeth were bad. What struck me most was the way he spoke: a little shy, hesitating as though worried no one would believe him. I half did. Later, while giving me a lift to the next town north, he showed me the spot of the road where she usually appears, near a lonely boulder on an empty stretch of moorland, a ghostly place.

 

A crazy idea entered my head. I had a tent . . . I needed a place to spend the night, and any old patch of earth would do . . . Sure, she usually appears in cars and carriages, but who would be out walking here—or sleeping? We got to town and parted ways. I stocked up on egg sandwiches I hoped wouldn’t spoil and got more water, just in case. Then I set off into the wild. My feet carried me north, into the hills, toward the rocky shore. I wanted to see the ocean beating on the farthest reaches of the islands. I wanted to stare out to sea and know there wasn’t a rock between me and the North Pole. But every footstep took me farther from that empty patch of road I might never return to, that lonely boulder and that pale white ghost.

 

The afternoon was long and the evening was longer. I clung to steep slopes while angry bonxies screeched above me, skirted narrow lakes, dragged myself over rusted fences and up tall hills before I finally reached the end of the land. The hours passed. The sky grew half dark, and with the north wind at my back I started the long trek back toward town. After a few too many exhausted paces and a welcome ride from a carful of Australians I made it back to civilization minutes before last call at the pub. Finally, now, filled to bursting with the wild north, it was time for a drink.

 

I looked at the taps behind the bar. I squinted, shook my head, looked again. The salt wind had addled my brain, or maybe I was already asleep and dreaming, or worse. I checked once more and finally had to admit that it was real. There she was, waiting for me where I least expected her, staring from the tap handle: White Wife ale, brewed on Unst by Valhalla Brewery in honor of the local apparition.

 

I couldn’t have ordered anything else. As I held the pint it seemed to glow with the uncanny light of a dozen possible futures, strange ones where I had strolled along a different road, staked my tent by a lonely boulder, maybe come face to face with a thing from another world that I would have to spend a lifetime trying to understand. And as I thought about the path I had taken—the alien hills, the menacing birds, the immeasurable northern ocean—it didn’t seem so different.

 

I don’t remember how it tasted. It wasn’t a drink. It was a haunting.

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The Whole Wide World

Posted on September 17th, 2012

I am fifteen, when it starts, or fifteen and a half, and I have cut off most of my hair. We are in the same creative writing class, and I’ve started to write these poems, about an older boy that I don’t know, because it’s safe, and whatever adolescent longing I’ve accumulated from being the bookish, blush-prone, chubby nerdy girl who then developed a love of backpacking and wearing men’s boxer shorts as outside shorts doesn’t matter, in between the syllables. One of these poems, I can’t remember which, makes you write me a letter, and hand it to me, as we’re leaving class. The letter tells me that I have stunned you. You have a girlfriend. I ignore them, those two stray marks near the end, the x, and the o.

When I write back, and we have never had a conversation yet, outside of talking around ourselves in class, it begins a series of passed pieces of paper in the hallways, growing steadily fatter. I write more longing odes about a boy who isn’t you, you tell me about lying on the cool tiles of the bathroom floor as the weather grows warmer. I get chosen to attend the same young writer’s conference, in Vermont, that you went to last year, because you, also, are older than me. I realize that I will turn sixteen while I am there, and this seems like a sign, somehow. It seems like something.

Our teacher is a small, kohl-inked eyed woman, whose irises are a remarkable glowing golden yellow brown, and what I don’t tell her is that, in her compact curvaceousness, whenever she talks about love, or her lover, I think so. There is hope. Hope for the non-smooth-limbed of us, the short of us, the those of us who cut off most of their hair and whose bodies are always willfully full, instead of waningly slender. Who tape their shoes together, and their nerves, and button their old lady cardigans tight. When I show up to be driven to the woods to sit and write with other earnest teenagers, you show up too, and hand me a present. Books of poems, each different, each with an inscription in your spindle script. They are written by communists, alcoholics, South Americans. You say you look like Tom McGrath. You tell me I am better than one of them. It is like a cake I have eaten, sweet and unexpected, and we still say nothing. And, at the bottom of the bag, tapes—each with a handmade cover. On one, a clear blue sky, a weathervane, white drifting clouds. On the other, a bottle green wall, a telephone booth. I can’t listen to them, yet. I know that I can’t. Good luck, you say. You will be great. I say thank you, and I know it’s the wrong thing.

I get in the black Saab, and think that it is like my teacher, compact and startling in its ferocity, and she drives in a way that exhorts the car to find the right words, choosing lines up the curving back roads in a steady, growing hum of barely leashed catastrophe. There is music that I don’t know on the radio, and she tells me that it’s the Smiths, and I think that she is the most glorious thing, the brightest, the best, everything the secret parts of myself want to be, and because I am fifteen and a half, I don’t say that. I say ‘cool.’ The driving is carbonating my blood. I am so rarely in any moment, but I am in this one. Black car, black tar, black music, the fine hairs on my neck. The golden cuff on the upper slope of my ear. The heavy weight of the unsaid in that bag of books near my feet, tipping their edges against my shin with each sharp banking turn.

The girl that I am rooming with, in our old farmhouse at the edge of the meadow, whose wide porch looks back towards the barns, houses, and cluster of buildings, is a mouth breather at night. She doesn’t believe in deodorant. Our room takes on the subtle smell of night skin, and onions. She performs herself, red hair, glasses, an eastern European name, poetry about sex, loudly, daily. I button myself up inside my dad’s old oxford shirt. His old jeans. My duct-taped shoes. I hold your letters inside my head when she talks about fucking. It seems like a country I’ll never visit. I run a hand through the animal-pelt brevity of the hair on my neck, catch the eye of the brown-haired, no nonsense girl I’ve befriended from another room. We grin. The way that we did when we were all doing introductory tai chi on the lawn, and told to exchange our energies in widening circles between us. This is my dance space. This is your dance space. I think about all of the unspoken languages and their grammars. I don’t think about you, but feel the ghost of you following me across the lawn, and sliding down my back on the way in to the dining hall. It is May, but cold here at night, still. Your gaze seems like some sort of heated beam that followed me from Connecticut, and never fully disappears from somewhere behind my lungs.

I never tell anyone, so I’m not sure how they know, on the second to last day, that it is my birthday. But suddenly, in the middle of the noisy hum of dinner, the local college a cappella group arrives. And they are performing. And then, I am hauled onto the lap of the shaggy haired, grinning, oh god you’re cute frontman, and he, they, are singing happy birthday to me. They all are. The room is full of it. I have turned into a tomato. The most pleased tomato in all of Christendom. And there is cake. Glittering with candles, with the perfect voices, with the less perfect ones, with the sandalwood smell of the twenty year old boy whose arm has come casually around my dimpled waist as he tells me to have a happy birthday. To get in touch when I am eighteen. I eat a piece, thinking that the future tastes like buttercream.

When later, I slip away from the too much, all at once tightness, with the sweet sting of frosting still sticking to my newly sixteen year old mouth, I discover that it has snowed. I am too warm from the barn, from the blood that won’t leave my face, and the wind that comes over the field brings both grass and winter with it in a cool kiss. There are so many stars. I start in the darkness, towards the distant glow of our porch lights, knowing that other friends are waiting there. I feel the taut curve of my full stomach against the waistband of my father’s pants, and it feels good, it feels clean, to be here, my feet going numb in the unexpected white. I finally listened to a tape last night, which felt like an adult intimacy, songs chosen to go from a small hissing reel directly into my waiting ear. While I walk across the field, your words, and the last song, rise up, in two spare voices. I sing them to myself, in the not-spring, not-winter air. “and a tricky young southerly wind/came at me with its high whistling sound….I turned around to face it/with real arrogance burning inside/and I drank in/the whole, wide world.”

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Somewhere Between Blue And Orange

Posted on September 17th, 2012

He had been here before. This he had seen and he liked how the colors connected his theories.

Stuffed up and under the bowseat of the puttering sixteen-foot Alumaweld was a limp black Hefty bag with an extension cord, two pairs of flannel boxer shorts, a yet unopened can of Cheez Whiz and four teriyaki beef sticks. His dad’s friend called the beef sticks dilators and he didn’t know why exactly but he supposed they were about going to the bathroom because that subject made up at least half of the jokes that he had heard his dad’s friend tell that trip. Atop the platform of the seat were two half-empty cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, twenty two feet of braided nylon rope, and a five-and-three-quarter-inch crab gauge marked “Barely Legal”.

One of the beer cans was centered where the point of the boat’s bow came together. It served as his sighting.

The back end of the metal boat held four feet of reddish chain connected on one end to an iron loop screwed into a panel that was screwed to a warped piece of plywood that also had some bent nails and staples in it for reasons unknown. The other end was once probably connected to a heavy anchor, he reckoned, but the anchor, if it ever was connected, was not there anymore. The whole chain snake rested in five inches of four-stroke-oil-and-fuel-soaked water, which also suspended an empty yellow plastic Pennzoil receptacle with its top cut off for bailing, a No. 2 pencil, a styrofoam to-go cup from the diner, and the remaining threads of a gray terrycloth towel that had a gold grommet in one corner.

At the horizon line was the mouth where the blue of the open sea met the early orange of the sun. But the mouth was a long way off and they weren’t headed that far anyway.

On the starboard side of the beer can way out there was the jetty. He had seen boats pushed up against the long finger of rocks in rough weather as they made their way past the sand bar which extended from the smaller rocky bank on the port side. He wondered whether John Bird, who made the first sextant, would have trouble passing this sand bar if the weather was rough. In fact, he wondered if John Bird was even a mariner at all, or if he just understood the stars — which were gone now that it was morning — and he wondered whether Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon was right in casting John Bird that way in the story.

It was 7 a.m. right now and today he was a mariner.

Halfway between stem and stern sat two pinkish Northwest weekenders firmly lodged in middle age and wearing cotton, wool and rubber. At their feet were five traps made of wire and mesh and a whitish bucket of yellowish guts, pimply chicken parts, and fish heads kept company by a smushed brown container of Coppertone, an aluminum cooler of more Pabst Blue Ribbon, a half-eaten bacon and tomato sandwich in wax paper, a tackle box spray-painted dark green and peeling, and three pairs of brand-new cotton gloves with non-stick pebbled palms. They were white. One of the guys in the middle was his dad and he was white too when he wasn’t pinkish like he was now. That was funny to be pinkish, he thought. What had once filled the empty beer cans — which he hadn’t described earlier — were one part of the reason his dad was pinkish and the cool air right now was the other.

He steered the tiller of the leaky Evinrude outboard with one hand with the throttle turned hard to the fastest position. Even at full bore and with the motor’s audible plainchant the craft struggled against the current.

At fourteen years old this past May he was a city kid. His dad considered it an opportunity (for swilling beer but called it a “teaching moment” ha ha!) for the boy to pilot the small boat out of the small harbor and toward the fishing grounds while his dad and his buddy cracked 12-ounce pop top after 12-ounce pop top of pale cheap greenish lager. This was just fine with him.

Between the angry patch of eczema camped at the left corner of his upper lip and with his matted ruddy hair and freckles and how his right arm was tucked between the splayed zipper of his damp-rust-stained hoodie and fleece shirt underneath, he could have easily passed as local.

His left foot rested on an orange float that had come apart from its tether. It was the orange of the early sun that rose above the beer can on the bowseat.

He remembered Wassily Kandinsky had said that “orange is red brought nearer to humanity by yellow”. At his young age, some would question why he knew the words of a 19th century Russian painter or of a writer like Pynchon. He too remembered that local Indians considered orange a symbol of closeness. Of kin. He recalled that orange is the color of the Sacral chakra, which cracked him up when he remembered his dad’s sex jokes that continued during the weekend-long volley with his friend. He thought of the tin of seafood spice in the upper cupboard at home. The tall red letters “SEASONING” was brought nearer to humanity by the yellow of the Old Bay tin, he thought. That cooked crab turned a coral orange that felt like what the sky must look like during a whole summer in Los Angeles with the smog and all and not just during the early sun like here right now. That Kandisky would have liked Los Angeles after those cold winters in Moscow. That here it was going to be a cold blue winter. That the mouth of the bay looked blue and that in even colder months when he and his dad and his dad’s friend came crabbing here, his own mouth and lips got sort of blue also. That the white of the flesh inside the pinkish exoskeleton of the crab was so white it was almost blue but that was before it was cooked. That his dad’s skin was a similar color to that of the crab exoskeleton but that his dad was a Libra which was more about balance and not a Cancer which is the crab. That astrology was about the stars and he liked stars but they were gone because it was morning.

Of course this was only September and because September had an “er” it meant the Dungeness would be probably be fatter now. At least that’s what his dad had said. In July he remembered they had gotten some big rosy crabs from the Asian market in the city. Those were fat. Of course because they were from Chin’s they probably weren’t from this bay right here but they were good and fat and coral orange when they were done cooking and everyone was happy and drunk around the table on the back deck at the house in the city like they always were at that time of year. That they listened and played and talked about music but that they drank rosy wine in the city and not pale cheap canned beer like they do here.

He remembered that the music label that his dad liked best was called Blue Note but that his mom who was at home in the city right now liked singer-songwriters and to his own ear that music sounded warmer like the bright yellow of turmeric which is Indian but not local Indians who are now called Native Americans but the Indians who are people from India who know about chakra and sexual positions and how to best use the turmeric which sits next to the Old Bay in the cabinet at home and sometimes the beardy singer-songwriters like Ray LaMontagne or Alexi Murdoch or Damien Rice sound almost orange because even if they’re from somewhere far away they must spend a lot of time in Los Angeles recording and of course the color of the sky there and all and that the crab rolls which are made with rice (not Damien Rice ha ha!) are really the best in the suburban strip malls in places like Los Angeles or Seattle or at home in Portland or at least that’s what his dad says.

Take a breath, he thought. But he hadn’t said a word out loud. He was just excited. And besides it was time to put the rusty hooks through the fish heads and the chicken parts and then wind the wires up and around the ceiling of the traps and lower the traps and all into the water. And wait. Because when they would pull the traps it meant there would be crab which were hopefully male because only male crabs of at least five-and-three-quarter inches were legal and then crab would go into another pot — a hot pot — which is another word that Asians use for another dish altogether but that’s really what it was — a hot pot — with boiling water and all and that after those fat crabs in “er” months were lifted from the cold blue water they would go in the hot water and would turn coral orange.

He remembered that it was Vincent Van Gogh who said, “there is no blue without yellow and without orange” and remembered that it was during an excited state of mind that Vincent Van Gogh had cut off his pinkish ear and left it at the door of a whorehouse but that it was absinthe and not Pabst Blue Ribbon that Vincent Van Gogh had been drinking with Eugène Henri Paul Gaugin on that night he went sort of nuts.

Breathe deeply and relax, he thought. I’m not an artist or a writer or an inventor or an Indian.

It was 7:38 right now and today he was a crab fisherman.

As he had tried without success one hundred times before, his dad looked back from his seat, leaned over, and extended his shoulder and his arm and his hand and offered an aluminum can of beer that he had extracted from the aluminum cooler from the inside of the aluminum boat. And like a hundred times before, he refused. He was fourteen. He didn’t like beer except for the cans which he used for sighting right now.

But he liked this. He looked into the water. He liked what he saw in the colors.

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First World Hunter Gatherer: A Soundtrack For The Solitary Shopper

Posted on September 17th, 2012

My favorite time to go is after 10PM but I’m usually sleeping then, and most of them aren’t open that late anyway, so I settle for before 10AM weekends or around 3PM on Fridays. You can go whenever you like but I recommend avoiding 10AM-2PM Saturdays and Sundays unless you are a masochist who enjoys watching amateurs fumble around in each aisle directly in front of the item you are entirely sure you would like to purchase.

 Take an inventory of the pantry, and the fridge (but that should be just about scarce by now). Make a list keeping in mind the current store of goods. Don’t forget about the winter squash and abundance of tomatoes you just got from your farm share. What will you do with them, and what else do you need to do it? Figure out how many stops you have to make. One stop shopping? Or a triple threat with stops at the local independent natural market, the fruitery, and the supermarket? Each approach has its advantages so picking one is usually up to what you need, how much time you have, and your mood.

 Park the car, remembering never to back in, so that the trunk is readily available to receive the bounty. Take the beat up reusable bags out of the back seat and hold onto the list – don’t forget the pen. Walk in through the automatic door and find your chariot, give it a quick test to make sure it doesn’t have a wonky wheel or an ear-piercing squeak. Push it through the next set of doors and your quest for comestible triumph begins.

 The list is key – but know what is necessary; the oatmeal you eat every morning and the sack lunch staples, and the ingredients to complement your farm share odds and ends, and what can be abandoned in lieu of what entices you during your journey; almost everything else, however it should be a one for one swap by category. They all set it up so you start with produce….but buck the system and go there last. How can you possibly know what produce you need before you have picked your proteins, and know what state they are in? Which are fresh and will be used in the next day or two (they will need to be paired with ripe produce), and which are frozen, often fish, (and require produce that will ripen as the week progresses), and what specific meatless meals you have decided upon and what produce they require? Once you have the rest sorted out and in your carriage it’s time to forage through produce, hopefully the selection meets the aforementioned needs of meals you have mindfully planned, if not now is the time to make some substitutions.

 Check out and try to bag the groceries by category: frozen and refrigerated, dry goods, produce, non-food items. This will make unpacking much smoother. Once it’s all put away, take a load off. All your efforts will be rewarded in the coming days when you can come home to the makings of a good meal without any thought at all.

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Grandma’s Feather Bed

Posted on September 17th, 2012

Listening to my mom play guitar at our family’s cottage as our numerous guests sang along, I was only half enjoying myself. The other half was looking forward to a time when I could think back wistfully on my mom playing guitar at our family’s cottage as our guests sang along. I felt so removed from my daily existence that I even, for a time, narrated my life to myself, embellishing it with melodrama–“He turns the doorknob slo-o-owly”–as though it were a dime-store thriller, and I some hapless hero. I was ten years old.

Every summer, the families of my mom’s Bible Study cohort, or her folk music ensemble, would visit our family’s cottage for a weekend. Each family was responsible for cooking one meal for the entire group. Red Coleman coolers descended onto our red linoleum dining-room floor. One invariably held hot dogs, one sloppy joes. Another was probably refrigerating the makings of shredded chicken sandwiches.

Surrounded by this red-and-white wagon train was our pale yellow table, painted by my grandmother, who had also applied the Pennsylvania Dutch decals along its perimeter. The table’s chairs, bent metal beasts, matched the table, and had orange vinyl upholstery to protect them from soggy bathing suits. The main dish would be set in the middle, with side dishes and snacks all around: Macaroni and cheese, three-bean salad, Ruffles with French onion dip, pasta salad, pickled eggs, or deviled. Then there were the desserts: variations on brownies, chocolate chip cookies with more butter than flour, a Jell-o salad or two, flattened buckeyes.

We kids served ourselves first, plopping a little bit of each homemade dish onto our segmented plastic plates. We each had a plastic cup we’d written our names on. If we didn’t fill this with Fresca, or Sprite, or Vernor’s ginger ale, we could also choose a kid-sized Sunny Delight or a barrel-shaped , foil-sealed Lil’ Chug that always left a sharpness in the back of my throat. Soon enough—our plates emptied, our drinks cached, and our bellies several cookies overstuffed—we’d head back outside, to explore the woods or splash around in the lake.

As evening came, we’d gather for singing: the children, the adults, and Cocoa, the shih-tzu with a pink bow in her gray coif. My mom would tune the twelve-string guitar before playing for us in front of the bay window. The oaks behind her gathered into dusk.

We’d sing songs she’d learned decades before as a counselor at a Lutheran camp. We’d sing hymns and folk tunes everyone knew by heart, and whatever new song anyone wanted to teach us. The slower songs spoke to me, and are still part of the spiritual-musical jungle gym I climb around in. But even I, half removed from every happening in those days, and inherently inclined towards the maudlin, enjoyed the silly songs as much as the touching ones. Among my favorites were The Kingston Trio’s MTA; an up-tempo eschatological tune called The Wedding Banquet; and above all, John Denver’s Grandma’s Feather Bed. We’d all join in the chorus, trying gleefully to say each syllable as fast as it came: “It was made from the feathers of forty-leven geese, took a whole bolt of cloth for the tick.”

My mom would sing the verses herself, as the rest of us snacked on stove-popped popcorn and s’mores. The story this song told wasn’t one I looked forward to remembering wistfully some day down the line. It was a story whose sense of togetherness I related to wholeheartedly, no part of me holding back or narrating about it. What’s more, it was told with a mischief I could never quite muster, and which I therefore admired. When I sing the song now—“it’s nine feet high, six feet wide, soft as a downy chick”—I see Grandma’s Feather Bed still standing where I’ve always imagined it: in the porch above the carport at a cottage outside Brooklyn, Michigan, on the shores of Timber Lake.

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