November 2008: I’ve been hunting with a friend this morning not far inland from the waters of Sandusky Bay on Lake Erie and we have a single Canada goose to show for our efforts. It’s been a chilly, rainy morning and the first things on our minds upon arriving at my house are whiskey and beer. There’s something peculiarly toothsome and heartening about Newcastle Brown Ale on a raw fall day. We tie in to several bottles (and a few slugs of Canadian Club) and at some point my black Labrador, Bleu, manages to topple a beer bottle and then lick greedily at the resulting spill. My laughter startled him. Trusted sources have since informed me that beer is not at all good for dogs, which adds to my fascination with Bleu’s obsession. I ponder that he doesn’t have a better nose for food (and beer) than ducks.

 

 

April 2009: I’m perch fishing with my father, brother, and nephew, and the action is good. All morning we’ve been drifting the same shallow, sandy flat behind a small wooded island on Mosquito Lake in northeast Ohio, and all morning we’ve been boating 10-15 yellow perch per drift. It’s their spawning season and the males squirt milky jets of semen as they’re pulled from the water. Down at the other end of the boat, my father lands a double (a fish on each line) and not a second later, my nephew hooks a double of his own. Watching the action, I feel my ultra-light go electric. I set the hook and reel in a fat little perch, maybe my largest of the day. I can think of no better way to commemorate this particular drift than an ice-cold can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, which I happen to have on hand.

 

 

January 2011: Rumbling down the basement steps of a friend’s home in Kalamazoo, he tells me: “Yeah, I have some beer.” I’m confronted with a tall cabinet thick with boxes and bottles of beer (and a little wine) in various stages of maturation. After tasting a few, I’m struck dumb with the notion that my beer experience has been missing something immense and perhaps mystical: the patience to cellar and age appropriate varieties of beer. We open a positively wicked 2009 Bell’s Eccentric Ale and the proof is on the tongue. I begin cellaring upon returning home to Ohio. Two months later my family doctor tells me he believes I have celiac disease. Wary of gluten (and fearing for my bowels), I pour the majority of my cellared beers for dear friends when they come to visit and find that the only thing more pleasurable than enjoying a beautifully made craft beer myself is watching someone else experience it. Sometimes the palate wants imagination, not reality.

 

 

February 2003: Through the window of the third story apartment, I’m watching bare trees gesture above the rooftops and streetlights of Morgantown, West Virginia. The entire city has been snowed-in for two days now. My soulmate and future wife is asleep in the next room and I’ve stayed up to read a few pages of poetry and sip some beer. Eight years later, writing this, I have no idea what I was reading, and for that matter, I have no idea what I was drinking (although Samuel Adams Double Bock makes a fine guess)—neither is of any importance. This is a case where context overwhelms details: I would hope that the poems I read moved me, but I don’t really know if they did. I would hope that the last sip of beer served as a physical, temporal reminder of the positivity and joyfulness that life requires us to seek out, but I can’t say it did that night, although it certainly has in the past. I know that I slept well and woke feeling thoroughly content to be human at the edge of the future.

 

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