James Finn Garner
When my parents were newly married, friends in Chicago threw them a “bar shower”. The gifts at that event were things like Tom Collins glasses, cocktail shakers and strainers. The one surviving gift set are beer glasses decorated with various poker hands. On this glass, one of six I still have, you can just make out that the playing cards on it are a “Royal Flush,” which is also printed on the other side. (This glass is full of my homebrew beer, but that’s a story for another time.) Before they were run through the dishwasher neglectfully, the blacks, whites and reds of the cards were quite vivid.
My dad was a beer drinker, and these were his go-to glasses. The golden Stroh’s beer that filled it had an ethereal quality when I was little. Everything about Dad had an ethereal quality, because he was a man of few words, and left a lot to his sons’ imaginations. I can remember sitting in his lap while he watched football games on TV, the smell of Right Guard and Vitalis, the warmth of the flesh that surrounded me like a nest. He would sing fight songs for schools that I don’t think existed, and make references to Bronko Nagurski, whom I was SURE never existed. Whoever would name their kid BRONCO? He gave me sips of his beer, which I hated but loved.
These glasses give off an air of mid-1950s surety. Conviviality and confidence. Neighborhood cocktail parties, bonhomie and optimism. I grew up in the Detroit suburbs. The early 1960s was a bustling time there, witnessing a prosperity (for most) that wasn’t seen again until Silicon Valley. Soon the civil rights movement and the Viet Nam protests commanded people’s attention, and auto executives began wearing wider lapels, though not the guys in finance, like my dad. I wonder if he ever reflected on these beer glasses, whether they ever gave him a pang of nostalgia, or a frisson of regret or loss, or an amazement at the velocity/rapacity of Time.
Neighborhood cocktail parties became fewer and fewer as families grew older and the neighbors hit later middle age. My dad was a terrible loner and didn’t miss them. His habit was to go to what Michiganders call the “party store” at 10 pm to buy the next morning’s Free Press and a quart of beer. He would then pore over that paper in his boxers and drink that Stroh’s. I don’t think he was an alcoholic, but the beer did help kill that taciturn, thoughtful man at an early age. And with him went his thoughts, about marriage, his sons, happiness, God and the future. When I drink from these glasses now, I toast him quietly, wishing for him a few more years of life, enjoyment and contemplation.