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To the Tavern Born
"The key to growth is the introduction of higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness." -- Lao TzuIt was customary among Chicago Irish Catholics in the 1950s to use children as beer caddies. Take my wife, Bernadette: When her grandfather's love for storytelling left his throat dry, he sent her out for more beer. She'd step out her back door, walk down an alleyway to the local tavern, and show the bartender a note from her grandfather. That Bernadette was an eleven-year-old with pigtails didn't faze anyone in the slightest -- the bartender simply handed her a couple of quarts of beer as if it was milk and sent her on her way.
Running out of beer was never a problem at my house -- the fridge was always stocked with cans of Budweiser. "Run along, Bobby," my own grandfather would shout from his favorite chair, "and fetch me a beer."
"Bobby" wasn't the result of too much afternoon drinking -- it was actually what people called me through most of my childhood. I was born George Robert Wendt III, which meant my father got to be the George in the family. I'd almost completely forgotten that my name was George until I heard a teacher calling it out on my first day of kindergarten. "I guess that's me," I finally replied. I like to think this kind of flexibility prepared me for later in life, when complete strangers started calling me "Norm."
After I'd retrieved the beer for my grandfather -- and opened the can with a church key -- I got my reward: a taste. I'll never forget the first time he let me try his beer, when I was maybe eight years old. Since then I've tossed back plenty of brews that are supposed to be better than Bud, but nothing's ever going to match that first sip. For some people, beer's an acquired taste. Not me. Right off the bat I thought I was drinking a little bit of heaven -- no mystery as to how the church key got its name.
Nowadays our grandparents would probably be accused of enabling alcoholism. But I've always suspected that babies are born loving beer. Bernadette's grandfather taught her twin brothers to walk by holding out a beer can. Maybe it's a regional thing: French babies might love wine, while Russian rugrats enter the world with a taste for vodka. I wouldn't know -- in Chicago, beer is pretty much synonymous with mother's milk.
There have been breweries in Chicago since the 1830s, when "Chicago" meant a few hundred settlers surrounded by corn and wigwams full of pissed-off Potawatomis. The settlement was eventually invaded, not by angry Native Americans but European immigrants, mostly German and Irish. The Germans brought lager and a drinking culture that stretched back centuries. The Irish brought their thirst. I'm either fortunate or cursed to have been born into both heritages.
My father's people were actually from Danzig, which is the same place that Poland calls Gdansk. It's been part of Poland for over a thousand years, except for the almost two hundred years it was part of Germany. So while my father's people called themselves Germans, I'm still on the fence as to whether or not I should be offended by Polish jokes.
Not that there was a lot of talk about the Old Country in my home -- all four of my grandparents were born in Chicago, or County Cook, in the vernacular of the South Side Irish. As a kid, the only thing I knew about my mother's people was that they were from Ireland. Years later, while planning a visit to her ancestral land, I asked her exactly where.
"Oh," she said, "Mayo, God help...
