pigeon

Ice House root beer

In a make believe town inside a bottle, a faery realm inside a snow globe, a riverscape your mind’s eye conjures out of a trickle of rainwater coursing over a mossy log, there’s a place where the water meets the land, zero depth, no fanfare, the ripples lap minutely up a gentle slope, chaotically defining an indefinable boundary.

Walk on up the slope a little ways, follow the cracked concrete, over to the left you’ll find the Ice House.

Swaybacked wooden loading dock, dilapidated grandeur. Sunset filtered by the dust of another era’s industry. A lifetime ago, this was the only place around that could produce ice all year long. Brine tanks, ammonia cooling system. “Ice fields.” Chipping, blocking, hauling, bagging. They don’t do any of that anymore, though, but they still serve beer.

And of course, cold, delectable root beer, because that’s what your dad bought for you and your brother — only one bottle, though. For some reason we had to share. Can you imagine?

So we clambered into the back of the Gran Torino, my dad and my stepmom got in front, and he drove on up the hot old street, heading back towards my grandparents’ house.

The house would be cool, shady, and smelling of petunias. There would be lace curtains, knurled cream-colored bedspreads, stuffed rocking chairs with afghans folded neatly over the backs. The tidy kitchen with green and black tile shining smartly. The narrow steps to the basement — for my brother and me, our temporary lair, with cots to sleep on like relaxed little soldiers, with blankets that smelled pleasantly not like the ones at home, not exactly musty, but just — different, somehow, like a cool dry forest floor. In the basement there was real quietness, and time stood still, as still as my grandpa’s rows of wooden spools that he’d saved when my grandma had used up all the thread, saved and lined them up above the wooden workshop table for some reason.

But in the meantime it was hot. The old Ford didn’t have air conditioning, so my brother and I slung our little monkey bodies across that bench seat in the back, windows cranked all the way open, sunshine gleaming hard off the chrome tips of the door lock buttons, and passed that heavenly root beer back and forth.

And back. And forth. And back. And forth. I took a drink, passed it. He took a drink, passed it back. Repeat until almost empty, when my stepmom, apparently unable to stifle her annoyance at this weirdly robotic cadence, chastised us.

“Why don’t you slow down a little bit, for heaven’s sake? You’re passing it back and forth so fast and just guzzling it down, you’re not even taking the time to savor it!”

We stopped mid-swig and stared dumbly for a moment. Any kid knows this feeling all too well: We were doing it wrong.

I mean, she had a valid point. There is definitely something to be said for cultivating a sense of leisure. Appreciating, not merely consuming, doesn’t necessarily come naturally — ask any Quik bunny about the sense of desolation, the dejected realization that once again, we’ve drained the cup and that’s it, there’s no more left, and now we’re bereft. Why, it’s almost as if capitalist consumerism were designed to get us to behave that way! Nooooooo, surely not, couldn’t be!

On the other hand, hold on now, it was our root beer, right? Hadn’t we the right to drink it however swiftly and mechanically we wanted? How is it diminishing your enjoyment of life if we’re not enjoying it in the way you consider proper or ideal? Such do I imagine were the self-righteous retorts we must have thought but didn’t say aloud.

Well, being kids, we did our best to oblige. The rest of our imbibing took the form of a strained performance of patient luxury. I took a drink, then held onto the bottle while trying not to look like I was counting down some arbitrary inexact number of seconds, passed it back. He swirled the bottle and looked out the window just long enough for someone to have taken a nice photograph had they been so inclined, then ever so casually took a drink, passed it back to me. Mercifully, there were only a few swallows left by that time, so this gawky charade didn’t limp along much longer.

It reminds me a little bit of Great Expectations, when Miss Havisham commands Pip to play: “I think it will be conceded by my most disputatious reader, that she could hardly have directed an unfortunate boy to do anything in the wide world more difficult to be done under the circumstances.” Don’t get me wrong; my stepmother was and is no Miss Havisham, not even close, thank god. But I do like to stop and think sometimes, when I draw the day’s random pigeon, what is it about each one that has made it stick in my mind for however many years, and I think this one has something, after all, to do with — expectations!

We were kids, she was of course an adult, and adults are cursed with the ability to see the glamor fading off the faery realm, to count the heartbeats, calculate the sunset, feel the chill behind the gold that makes the shadows long.

A childhood summer is an aeon, overfull with riches; thus, a root beer can simply be a thing you drink. Delicious. Gulp it down. Why not? The adult, however, unable not to try to make time stop, constantly must strive to stuff the world back inside the snowglobe.

Maybe she was reaching back in time, saying, please, for me, don’t rush, don’t blink, slow down, make it all slow down —

Lord knows I try (and fail) to do that all the time — every time I fetishize an obsolete computer, or buy another typewriter —

You only fully understand what’s lost after it’s too late to experience it the same way ever again — I mean, obviously, I guess, because when you were genuinely in it, like when you were a kid, you hadn’t lost it yet — or, maybe you had, actually? Maybe we’re losing everything, all the time, every instant, no matter how old we are.

Shit! Pass me that root beer! Drink up! We may not get another chance!