Part 1 (I think I might be kind of a beer snob)

First, missing my friends and the wonderful people goes without saying. Second, I could have written a whole page listing things I used to do or see every day that I can’t or don’t anymore, but who wants to read that? Plus, I would get sad writing it and that’s not the point here. I’d rather think about how funny it is when you realize you miss certain things.

1: Good beer:

“Hot” doesn’t do justice to the temperature (nor to the general sense you are being slowly smothered by the air) in East Texas in the summer. Even the lake water turns from a refreshing splash to a disheartening splish by the end of a day in the sun. My cousins, aunt and uncle, and I sat on our life jackets in what was quickly becoming uncomfortably warm water. We laughed and shared stories from long ago, or days ago, and we downed our cold beers like water. The near-boiling lake water just wasn’t getting the job done so really beer was our only hope for survival.

Now, I have never been much of beer snob (or so I thought). I’d go to 2$ pint night and while many of my friends would “ooh” and “ahh” and drool a little over a good stout or an IPA that could make your eye-lids curl back, I would sip happily on my Blue Moon or whatever  local wheat beer was available. Every now and then I would step over into Guinness land or tiptoe around in Red Ale world. The really bitter beers weren’t so much my thing, but I could stomach one in a pinch. My only experience with “cheap beer” began and ended with Pabst Blue Ribbon. That was the party beer. You just chugged it and after about 3 you were at least tipsy enough not to care what it tasted like the rest of the night. That was two years ago though. I hadn’t voluntarily sipped anything that was better suited for beer bonging since before graduation.

Ok, so back to the lake: I mentioned we were downing beers like water. The only beer you can down like water (If you can down a Guinness like water, you should get that checked out) is what I previously referred to as cheap beer (Bud Lite, Budweiser, Keystone, PBR, Coors…anything else you might find in a gas station in Texas). That’s right, my family could probably be credited with funding a whole summer’s worth of Bud Lite production. I think they polished off at least a couple of 30-racks over the weekend. I drank 8 beers in two and a half days. It took another two days to drink another four. I just couldn’t bring myself to down the stuff.

Even after my sober weekend I didn’t really realize that I missed good beer. I just confirmed that I didn’t like cheap beer. I still had a blast with my family, and when I got home I just went back to drinking water all the time as usual. It wasn’t until a few weeks later when my parents took me to Ranger Ball Park for a baseball game that it happened. I hadn’t had another beer since the lake and hadn’t thought anything of it, but as we sat in the Captain Morgan Club looking over the menu “Blue Moon” just about jumped off the page and kissed me on the face. That was it. No pondering necessary. “I’ll have water and a Blue Moon please.” When the bottle appeared in front of me I might have gotten a little too excited (like Christmas morning to a 7-year-old excited as opposed to the appropriate confined satisfaction a 24-year-old should have when encountering a beer). I squeezed the orange slice down into the bottle and took a big refreshing swig. It tasted like home. It tasted like sitting out on a patio surrounded by my friends, laughing and making all kinds of crazy plans. It tasted like watching the sun set from the front steps or like floating the river in the sun.

I know Blue Moon isn’t great beer. I know plenty of people who would turn their noses up at the mere thought of it. You take what you can get though, and that Wednesday night, sitting in that Bar in East Texas, I took that Blue Moon and I enjoyed every last sip of it like I had enjoyed every last minute I spent in Durango.

[To be continued: I’ll cover coffee and fashion faux pas later. We’ll call it a series.]