December, 1919 – Chapter 4

Welcome to chapter four of “December, 1919″, a serialized novel written by Oliver Gray. New chapters will be published every Wednesday. Links to all published chapters can be found here. 

Chapter 4

As the hammer sank the pin deep into the flesh of the primer, a spark nested in a bed of powder, heating it, igniting it, exploding it, forcing the bullet out of its cozy barreled home into the crisp December air. The cold didn’t slow its attack; it seemed neither bothered nor fettered by the chill as it ripped into the wood at the end of the lane much faster than my eyes could track it. Before the man-shaped target could recover from the first blow, a second, then a third, then a fourth pounded into his chest and neck. Every time the gun roared out into the afternoon, my eyes involuntarily blinked. Like a modern, metal Medusa, they didn’t want to look directly at the fury, lest it turn its deadly attention on me.

A fifth shot careened wide, just to the left. McGuire lowered his pistol and exhaled deeply.

“Don’t just stand there, kid. Either shoot or leave. I hate having someone looking over my shoulder. Makes me nervous.” he said, without turning to look at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said, words manifesting as puffs of steam, “I don’t shoot. I mean I’ve never shot. My father didn’t like guns.” The targets shuddering under the force of all the slugs sent my mind down a dark alley that lead to an image of my father, down and bleeding, multiple holes in his back.

“Funny attitude for a veteran,” he said, carefully sliding bullets into the magazine with practiced, calloused fingers. “I suppose I can understand that. Your dad was a good soldier, but never really cut out for a life of fighting.”

The non-stop shots, coming at random intervals, echoed out into the skyline, eventually fading out somewhere near the clouds. I closed my eyes and in my mind tried to layer yelling, cries of pain, and artillery strikes on top of the gunfire. No one ever talked about the war much, and I had no way of knowing what my father, McGuire, and those hundreds of thousands of other men had endured. Every crack and bang crept through my subconscious like a worm made of fear, playing back all those nights my dad had woken up in the worst part of his dreams, screaming, crying, shaking at some memory of northern France.

“Nate told me you’d be here, so I…”

McGuire interrupted, “of course he told you I’d be here. Bet he didn’t tell you why I’d be here.” He fired his eighth shot with composure, plugging a perfect hole in the middle of the circle on the target’s right shoulder. “See that goon with slicked back hair in lane 10? That’s Joseph Cavoli, some glorified knuckleduster from New York. Next to him, in the sharp grey suit? Brian Cleary, a distiller from Boston. Both claimed to have come down here to find work, but it’s been two months, and neither have jobs. They’ve been chummy with detective Berman, and I want to know why.”

I watched the two men fire shiny new revolvers. They lacked the grace and precision of McGuire, but made up for it in enthusiasm. Six shots for every one of McGuire’s. They laughed with each other, dropping bullet after bullet into spinning chambers,  but from this distance, it was impossible to make out what they were saying.

“Look kid, I know why you’re here. I knew you’d read those notes,” he said, finally setting the gun down and turning to face me. In his olive drab jacket he looked like a quintessential soldier; broad, brave, bold. “I can’t help you. Not yet at least. I’m working from the ghost of a hunch here. I knew you’d come find me, I just didn’t think you’d come find me here.” Smoke from the powder had started to choke the afternoon with sulfur and charcoal.

I stood silently, partly unsure what to say, partly intimidated by place and presence. McGuire forced a smile. “If I find out anything, I’ll tell you and your mother first. Please just trust me. Don’t you have more important things to do than follow me around, anyway? Like, maybe, oh, I don’t know, running a brewery?”

I blushed. He had a point. I’d just run off and left everything to George in my fog of selfish mourning. As I turned to leave, I stopped, brain whirring. “Wait, how did you know about that?”

“There’s not much goes on in this city I don’t know about,” he said. “Call it reporter’s intuition.” He smiled. I nodded.

“Oh, and kid? Do yourself a favor. Learn how to shoot. I have a feeling the streets of Philadelphia are going to get a lot uglier in the wake of the 18th.” McGuire turned back to his target, raised his pistol, and fired.

---

Virginia slung herself halfway into the window of the kettle, sucking in the sweet steam from the wort. “Hops! We need more hops!”

George sighed. “It’s a pale ale for chrissake! If we add any more hops it’s going to be too bitter to drink. You have to learn the limits of these things, Virginia.”

“But they smell so good! Looks, Jack will agree with me. Needs more hops, right Jack?” She swung down off the small step ladder and ran over to me. George glared at me before sinking his shovel into a huge pile of spent grain. “So glad you found some time to come see us. Are you just going to stand there, or actually try to do some work?” He said, tossing the shovel to me. “This pile needs to be moved so that farmer Prescott can come pick it up. I said he could have this batch.”

“Free?” I said. “Dad usually sold it for a pennies a pound.”

“Well your dad ain’t here, is he?” George said, “Prescott had a rough crop last summer and he needs to keep his animals fed, so I said he could have it. We ain’t using it for anything anymore. There’s more to this business than beer and dollars. Your dad knew that.”

Virginia nudged me with her elbow and whispered, “Don’t mind him. He’s just being grumpy. Come smell this wort. Don’t you think it needs more hops?” She grabbed my hand and jerked me across the room to the kettle. As she dangled again, steam rising up through her curls, the malt mixed with her Watkins hair rinse, flooding my brain with delicious memories. She reached up and grabbed me by the waist, pulling me down down to her level.

“I’ve got a plan, like we talked about before” she said, in the privacy of their bubbling kettle. “But we can’t tell George.”

To be continued…

December, 1919 – Chapter 3

Welcome to chapter three of “December, 1919″, a serialized novel written by Oliver Gray. New chapters will be published every Wednesday. Links to all published chapters can be found here.

Chapter 3

Yellowing teeth snarled from chew-scarred gums, billowing hot, noisome breath inches from my face. The beast crept forward, thick skin partially obscuring dark, bloodshot eyes. If not for a wall of chained links, it would have been on top of me, tearing my clothes and skin. I kicked  the fence near it to try to scare it off, but it only seemed to get more angry, dropping its head and growl to a lower, more serious pitch.

“Why do we always have to go this way?” I said, trying to refill my lungs. “You know that dog hates me.” I had toppled clumsily over the fence to avoid being mauled, landing awkwardly on my right shoulder. It throbbed in time with my panicked heartbeat.

Virginia laughed, watching me struggle to my feet as she sat on a trashcan at the end of the alley. “It’s a better way to the Inquirer,” she said right before crunching into an apple she’d magicked form her pocket, “you gotta get to know the city, Jack; the main roads will never teach you anything. Besides,  I wanna make sure you haven’t gone soft, sitting at that desk all day, writing.” Her inflection on the last word pierced my pride. She scribbled her hand in the air in a condescending pantomime.

“I haven’t gone soft,” I said, “there’s a lot of hard work in reporting a story, you know.”

Virginia rolled her eyes. She’d known me long before I was infected with the journalistic bug. She remembered a version of me who spent hours scouring rooftops for perfect blackbird feathers, a version of me who’d rather have explored, and adventured, and gotten into trouble than sit at some desk being tutored by old men in suits. We’d slipped apart as the years got leaner, meaner, cursed by war. She’d never been happy that I’d snubbed my father’s chance at apprenticeship in the brewery, mostly because she couldn’t see me as anyone but the 13 year old boy who lived in her memories. I couldn’t get angry; I was guilty of the same. It was difficult for me to look at her freckles and not see the girl I’d swooned over in the throes of adolescent love, difficult to see her now, made hard and cold, all that playful jeux de vie snuffed out by the world. By the world, and by George.

We popped out of the alley and turned left onto Fayette street to cross the bridge over the Schuylkill. The frozen water caught the sun’s reflection and distorted it like a broken mirror. I imagined the individual droplets rolling on in unrelenting mass exodus to the ocean, only to be scooped up by our little brewery, forever married to malt before moving into a new, glassy home. Father always said that life began in the water. Looking off at the horizon and seeing the little river disappear into some impossibly remote unknown, it was easy to believe him.

“This is where I leave you,” Virginia said, throwing her arms around me in the most platonic of hugs. “Gotta get back before the mash rest is done, or George’ll have my ass.”

I watched her hair bob down another alley near Bar Harbor. Sometimes she seemed incapable of walking down the side walk like a normal person.

The Inquirer building loomed. I used to think the current building was architecturally impressive, but I’d recently been by the site of the new building, a massive, 18-story behemoth that was still under construction. It’s skeleton towered over everything around it, monolithic, austere, a monument to news that could not be ignored, especially by the neighbors who now lived in its shadow.

The old building heaved under the energy of too many people into too small a space. The entrance saw younger valets running around trying to move cars, older valets handling the occasional horse and carriage. The coat-check revolved nonstop as visitors, reporters, and assorted law enforcement officers paraded in and out of the building on errands secret, private, or both. The hallways, lined with tiny one-desk offices, sang a cacophony of ringing telephones, tapping telegrams, scribbling pens, and enthusiastic conversation.

My desk was near a window; which, according to the senior staff, was incredibly lucky for someone of my age and inexperience. I flopped my coat over the old chair someone had found for me on one of the upper floors, and began the tedious job of transposing my colleague’s hand written notes into the clean click-clack-ching of typewriter pages. I’d barely finished a single paragraph when a stack of papers fell directly over my flying fingers.

I looked up. Nathan smiled. “More for you kid. I left numbers on each in terms of priority,” he said, pointing his pencil at the tops of the sheets. “You’ve got something from McGuire in there, so I suggest you do those first unless you want him barging in here in a huff like he does. He’s been such a pain in the ass since he won that award.” I wanted to like Nathan, but he always dumped his workload on me, usually so he could cut out early with that blonde who worked in the telegraph office. I nodded at him, pushed the papers to one side, and tried to finish what I was working on.

“Hey, Jack?” Nathan posed the question with that sympathetic intonation that heralds an uncomfortable conversation. “I heard about your dad. We all liked him around here. Great guy. Great beer. I spoke to Mr. Knight about it; if you need a break, we can cover for you.”

I looked up again. “Thanks, Nate. I think I’ll stay though. The work keeps my mind off of it,” I lied, “I might like to take this Saturday off though, to be with my mother.”

Nate winked. “Saturdays are slow in here anyway. I’m sure Mr. Knight won’t mind.” He cancelled out most of his kindness with a second pile of notes that he dropped on my desk just before he turned to leave.

I grabbed the stack of papers, and began to quickly scan the titles to put them into a workable order. McGuire’s piece found its way to the top, partly to placate him, partly because the stories he worked on were usually packed with local intrigue. As I loaded a new ribbon and set to my sisyphean labors, a few hastily scribbled lines in the middle of the notes caught my eye:

“Spoke to detective Berman about the “accidental” death of Andrew Cooper. Claims he wasn’t aware of Cooper’s politics. Story doesn’t add up. Will follow up in the next few days.”

To be continued…

December, 1919 – Chapter 2

Onto and into the second chapter of “December, 1919″, a serialized novel written by Oliver Gray. New chapters will be published every Wednesday. Links to all published chapters can be found here.

Chapter 2

I’ve always likened the brewery to a newsroom; a teaming hive of lives all running about on singular errands, but working towards the same ultimate goal. But where the newsroom housed literal lives, men in ties making phone calls and attacking paper with pen, the brewery overflowed with the sensation of life, pungent yeasts procreating, malt melting into sugary wort, nature allowing us to ever so briefly throw a bridle over its power. I’d spent most of my youth in that warehouse off of Market street, not so much helping as observing. My dad tried to instill a sense of work ethic in me, but there’s only so much seriousness a ten-year-old can stomach. Darting between copper kettles, across grated floors, over the new woven linen hoses, I watched men – no – titans, impossibly large and ribboned with muscle, heave bags of malt. They towered over me, sweaty, menacing, rough-hewn and dangerous, until they flashed me a smile. Sometimes, father would scoop a tiny bit of cracked malt into my hands as an odd, but welcome treat.

Nothing had physically changed, and the kettles still steamed their work into the cold morning. My father’s ghost hadn’t found its way back here yet, apparently, and his normal spot, next to the brew log, looked shadowed and sad. The boil bubbled subdued and doleful; even the birds who normally chirped and wrestled over strewn grain sang some subtle sorrow. The brewery itself, the building and all the equipment my dad has poured his life into, was in mourning.

Will spotted me first. “My boy, oh my dear boy. I’m so glad you came. You didn’t have to, you know. We can all take care of this place until you’re ready.” he said, clearly trying to be gentle.

“No, it’s fine,” I said, “I needed to get away.”

William turned and ushered me onto the brewery floor. He waddled, his knees unsure, and occasionally reached down to pull up the belt that was desperately trying to slip off of his huge belly. What he lacked in physical coordination, he made up for with wit and business savvy. “We’ve still got several orders to fill. Dobbin’s on 9th needs another barrel, but we’ll be late on our orders for Petsworth” he said, trailing off as he looked upward at the rays bouncing through the skylights.

A voiced boomed from the catwalk near the grain hopper, “Not that any of that will matter in a few weeks!” To those who didn’t know him, George looked frightening. A burst pipe and a fist of steam had badly burned the side of his face five years ago, and left his right eye milky and dead. He towered too, over six feet, built like some mythological hero. Father joked that George was descended from Hercules. “So, Jack, I guess you’re it now?” he said, venom sneaking into every word.

“Oh nevermind him,” said William, slightly under his breath, “before the war, he’d thought your father would leave him in charge, is all. I’m sure you’ll work together to get this mess sorted.” This mess. Now it was my mess. Twenty-three states had twisted closed the hydrants of free-flowing booze before the US had trenched into Europe, and now, even the capital had pulled the plug on any form of distillation. In part thanks to a dozen or so politically smart and stubborn brewers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania had stayed sane, and our brewery had survived the initial drought. But that “nonsense about the 18th” (as my father called it), stood signed, ratified, a hydra snarling its prohibitionist and protestant heads at our entire operation. It was only a matter of time before the gavel cracked, and the statist fingers of the law, supported by the Anti-Saloon League and the Temperance Union, crept in to ruin the business.

My mess. The only conversation I’d had with father about the coming tide amounted to, “don’t worry about it,” which was proving decidedly unhelpful now. I’d overheard him talking about using the brewery to make “near beer,” exploiting a loophole to skirt under the listed alcohol limits but still make beer and turn some, if much lesser, profit. There wouldn’t be much else to do with a brewery in a world where alcohol was illegal, aside from dismantling the copper and selling the space to some cannery or fishmonger.

“It’s not just that.” George had come down from the catwalk and now stood in front of us, massive arms locked across his chest. “He’s too young.”

I didn’t argue. This past October had been my seventeenth. While standing in for father during the war had tempered my boyish immaturity, I was terrified at the prospect of being in charge. I was my father’s son, especially temperamentally, but I had a fair share of my meek mother rattling around in my genes, too.

“I know, George. I need your help,” I said, stifling tears. The last thing I needed was to cry in front of him. He slapped a huge hand on the back of my head and pulled me forward until our foreheads were touching.

“Your father was a brother to me. I can’t change his decision now, but I can and will tell you what’s best for this brewery.” he said. I could see the pain in his one good eye. As tough as he was, the loss had lodge a knife into his heart. William batted at George. He let go of my head before nearly crushing me in a hug.

“We do need some sort of plan.” William said, “none of us quite know what Andrew was going to do.”

“We keep brewing.” The newest voice lilted in sharp opposition to William’s shrillness. Brow covered in malt dust, plaid sleeves rolled up, walnut hair tucked up and back, Virginia appeared from behind the kettle like a Venus just emerged from the fermentation tank. “We do what we do,” she said, a playful madness flashing across her green eyes.

“We brew. We mash and boil and ferment until they come in here with guns and force us to stop.”

To be continued…

December, 1919 – Chapter 1

Welcome to the first chapter of  “December, 1919”, a serialized novel written by Oliver Gray. New chapters will be published every Wednesday.

Chapter 1

Face red and flecked with sweat, he held his cap chest-height, scrunched between fidgeting fingers.

“G’d morning ma’am. That’s not to say it’s a good one. I’ve just come from down the docks,” the boy said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, as if trying to buy time before speaking again. “I’da telephoned you see, but then I remembered y’ain’t got one. I came running when I seen it. There’s been an accident ma’am.”

“Yer husband…” he said, dropping his head.

Mother’s face completed his sentence. Sickly pale and expressionless, like her spirit had already moved on to join my father, leaving her body behind as a barely breathing husk. We both lingered in the kitchen as seconds sludged by in agonizing silence. I wanted to speak, hug her, lie, conjure some linguistic magic to tell her we’d be OK without him. But instead I just stood, watching the sky turn rotten apple orange in a cloud-muddled sunset. At some point, my mother broke her silence, and left me alone at the kitchen table. Her shock faded into sobs, which, as the night’s shadows sank ever deeper, crescendoed into unrestrained wails. I couldn’t do anything except listen to her mourn and refill my glass.

The boy had offered little in his bumbling description of the events, just a blunt announcement that my father would never come bounding through that door into our home again. It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t know what really happened, he’d come of his own accord, in a rush, in the face of a situation that would have taken the heart of most boys. The police didn’t come to report his death for several hours, but when he hadn’t come trudging down that side alley after work the previous day like he did with machined consistency, we had braced ourselves for bad news. Part of me felt something change in the energy of our little home that night, a goodbye winked in the streetlights reflecting on the snow, in the quiet mewling of Andy, our alley cat, like the world was letting me know he was already gone.

It was hard to tell whether I’d fallen asleep, or if the bourbon had eloped with my consciousness at some point in the night. Solar knives cut through kitchen, piercing the Philadelphia air, highlighting the emotional hangover that had slung itself over the house. My mother still sobbed, but now her cries sounded pathetic, not angry. I cracked three eggs into a bowl. I wished I could do the same to my brain to relieve the pressure. As the clear turned white against the black of the cast iron and my mind focused back on painful reality, I heard a knock on the front door.

Before I could take the eggs off the heat, my mother emerged from her room, wiped her face, and forced a smile through puffy cheeks. She’d changed into a black dress. Sharp juxtaposition to her normal vibrant purples and blues. “I’ll get it,” she said.

I followed, not wanting her to be alone with anyone quite yet. I could see a man through the side window, but the sun glared at just the right angle to obscure his face. I was wary it might be the police again, or some nosy neighbor that wouldn’t want to leave my mother in peace until she has all the details to share with the church gossips. She cracked the door slightly, hiding most of her body behind the wood and hinges like a shield, and peeked out into the morning.

In perfectly pressed tweed stood my father’s oldest friend, Elmer Green. I hadn’t seen him in years. He’d put on quite a bit of weight, but those wrinkles – the natural tattoos of a man who smiles and smokes too much – gave him away. He took off his hat. “Sorry t’ bother you so early Meredith. And you, Jack. I was in New York. Came down as soon as I heard.”

Mother made some tea. Earl Grey. His favorite. Elmer slurped it thankfully, trying to shake December’s romantic advances. “I can’t believe it,” he said, steam from the cup obscuring his eyes, “Shot? And by the police no less? What did the inspector say? I just can’t believe Andrew made it through that hell for something like this to happen.” He stopped talking when mother’s eyes went dewy. “I’m sorry Mere, it just seems so…unfair.”

It was unfair. My father, the proud and loquacious Corporal Andrew Cooper, served two years in the blood-slick mud of the French countryside. He’d beaten the statistical odds and returned relatively unharmed, save for a shrapnel scar on his right cheek and some memories he’d rather have left on the other side of the Atlantic. He’d faced down Germany and death, emerging from the stink of the trenches victorious.

All to be mistakenly gunned down by some flatfoot who thought he’d make a name for himself by catching a thief.  “They thought he’d robbed a bank,” I said, trying to fill in some details for Elmer, “he was lugging a sack of barley. In the dark the police thought it was a bag of money.”

From the police recount, my father had acted suspiciously and refused to step out into the light to show himself to the officer. The officer in return felt threatened, and was forced to fire. This version of the story conflicted greatly with my father’s personality and with what the dockboy had told us. I didn’t know what to believe, except that a man had killed my father and wouldn’t face any justice for doing so.

Elmer reached into his bag and pulled out a stack of papers.

“I hate to do this now, but it’s important,” he said, shuffling through the mess of yellowing sheets. “Before we left for the War, Andrew asked me to witness for ‘im. I’ve got all the correspondence. He was worried he’d never come back from France, and wanted to make sure you and Mere was taken care of.”

“A will?” I asked. It was unlike my father to think so far ahead.

“Of sorts,” Elmer said, handing a careworn, fold-marked letter to me. “More like a contingency. Not officially legal, but a judge wouldn’t be denying these if you presented ’em. He left the house and service pension to Meredith. What little is left of his grandfather’s money is hers, too.”

I couldn’t handle it anymore. I’d forced the idea of his death from my mind when he went to war, imagined my father a modern day Achilles, nearly invulnerable, incapable of succumbing to a force so common as death. And now, after celebrating his return, finally settling back into some kind of familial normalcy, I had to face the senselessness of it all. I thanked Elmer for taking the time to see us, and excused myself before the dam behind my eyes gave way to the building torrent.

“Wait, Jack, there’s one more thing,” Elmer fished around in a separate pocket of the bag for another, much cleaner and official looking document.

I turned.

“He left the brewery to you.”

To be continued…

Craft and Draft: Three Words You Should Snip From Your Vocabulary

(Warning: This post contains grammar, a substance known by the state of California to cause headaches and crossed eyes)

In the literary long game, few experiences rival that of learning a new word, feeling the thrill of pristine morphology rolling around on your tongue, turning your brain into a squishy grey beanbag chair, getting comfortable in a new heuristic home. Expanding vocabulary is the writer’s prerogative after all, as each new word tempers the steel of the already mighty pen, and makes each new piece of imagery that much more formidable.

Bolts of pure hypocrisy would strike me dead if I claimed not to enjoy the tantalizing tug on my line as a multi-syllabic monster sinks its teeth into my baited hook, but many of us get caught up in the default mode of “acquire,” and forget that not all words are created equal. Every word deserves a chance at a happy linguistic life, but we’d be duping ourselves to suggest that “rock” and “ruby” are contextual equivalents. Some words, despite their best efforts, just aren’t very good. Some words exist on a tier that need not be used, not because said words are incorrect, but because so many better words exist just a short climb away.

When I edit, the following three suspects are my number one targets. I will hunt them down, aim my find/replace at their built-in bulls-eyes, removing and rezoning them before doing any other serious rewriting. If you want to improve your writing, train your eye to notice these words, learn to hate their complacency and laziness, get angry when they clutter up your sexy soliloquy of Shakespearean sentences with their sorry, sad, simplicity. They’re not always the bad guys (as exceptions to my rules exist in this very post), but they don’t exactly have a great track record, either.

“Thing” (as a stand-in for a real noun)

“Thing” by definition, means “an object that one need not, cannot, or does not wish to give a specific name to.” Why would you ever want something with so little syntactic power in your writing? If you use the word “thing,” you’re basically admitting defeat, claiming that some object in your sentence is beyond the descriptive powers of your infinitely creative brain. You should not be OK with that. The word “thing” is an insult to imagination, a slap in the face of poetic license.

Most writers use “thing” when they’re unsure how to describe a noun, but never come around to fix it in edit. In 99% of cases, “thing” can be replaced by a noun that shines, brings delectable context to the sentence, and ultimately makes the whole piece more enjoyable for writer and reader. Consider:

I have a thing to go to later.

-versus-

I have a pirate-themed bluegrass and beer festival to go to later. 

Don’t let “thing” bully you with its laziness. Your creativity deserves better. Watch out for his other slimy buddies, “stuff” and “something,” too.

Note: There are legitimate ways to use “thing,” especially when speaking in the abstract (see my hypocrisy in the next section), but it should never, ever, ever, stand in for a concrete noun.

“Boring” (as an adjective or subject compliment)

There’s nothing wrong with the verb “to bore,” especially the lesser used meaning that plays well with insects and power tools. If only we’d left this penetrating wonder alone, and not gotten so vernacular-happy with its adjectival form, “boring.” For shame, legions of internet commenters.

This may be part pet peeve, part personal preference, but no one should ever use the word “boring.” If you confidently state that you think an activity or event is “boring” I assume that your curiosity has lapsed into a coma, and the prognosis isn’t good. “Boring” suggests you’ve given up trying to learn, abandoned all hope in trying to figure out the nuance of why other people may find a particular thing enjoyable, and decided to subjectively relegate it into some bottom drawer, never to be bothered with again.

I think people use “boring” in two situations: 1) they don’t understand whatever it is they’re claiming is boring, or 2) they just don’t like it.

The latter is completely acceptable. But if you don’t like something, say you don’t like it. Don’t say it’s “boring,” because that’s a fundamental fallacy (as someone, somewhere, probably doesn’t think it’s boring).

The prior is completely unacceptable. New internet rule: you’re not allowed to call something boring until you fully understand it. If, after discovering all the fascinating minutiae, you still want to label something “boring,” go for it. But I’m willing to bet after experience and research, you’ll find that it isn’t boring at all, just maybe not your style.

Instead of writing “boring,” think about the emotion or feeling you’re trying to convey instead. What makes it “boring” to you? Is it confusing? Annoying? Vexing? If you replace “boring” with the underlying context of why you arrived at that descriptor, you’ll almost certainly have a better sentence as a result.

“Interesting” (as an adjective or subject compliment)

A complete one-eighty from the previous word, “interesting” is the flavorless lump of Subway bread of the linguistic world. “Interesting” means you found interest in something, which is about as generic as a word can get. Think about it; what does “interesting” ever really add to a sentence?

That’s an interesting sweater you’re wearing. This article on krill migration habits is interesting. What an interesting song choice!

The word means almost nothing. It adds no context, describes very little, and just sits there with a goofy look on its face.

You can do so much better than “interesting.” Get out there and date some fancier words, words with better jobs and better families, who really care about your writing and want you to succeed. Don’t get stuck in a rut of comfort with “interesting.” He’ll break your heart and lack the self awareness to even realize it.

As with “boring” consider what makes the topic interesting to you. Is it fascinating? Engaging? Joyous? Intricate? If you can dig deeper, past the perfunctory, you’ll find that you almost never need to use the word “interesting” because almost any other adjective would work better.

Maybe little snip?

Beer Review: Flying Dog Dead Rise Old Bay Summer Ale

Wooden mallets strike claws, sending fissures through crabby chitin, exposing the sweet, seasoned flesh beneath. Soft hands meet sharp shells, poking, probing, splitting, snapping; a modest labor for a morsel of meat. Twelve spices form a homogeneous cocktail with light lager and briny boil, resulting in a liquid unique to the summers of the Chesapeake watershed. The crustacean covered newspapers lining the tables tell a new story now, a story that to the outsider sounds like barbaric ritual, but to the native sounds like hallowed tradition.

Despite my international birth, I’m a Marylander. All of my education – from Jones Lane to Johns Hopkins – unfolded in the Old Line state, and I’ve called the marshy lands north of the Potomac home for nearly 25 years. There are those in other parts of the country who don’t understand Maryland’s insistence on maintaining a unique identity; those who find such cultural fervor from a small state cute, or quaint, or some combination there of. But the people of Ocean City, Baltimore, Annapolis, and Salisbury don’t just mindlessly crab and boil or Raven and Oriole, they hold high their state standard, proud that 9th smallest state boasts one of the biggest personalities.

A veteran of the picking art shows a tourist where and how to lift the plate to get at the blue gold in the body, like the master teaching the neophyte who reached the peak all the simple secrets of life. A little girl takes her time, building a mini-mountain of crab to eat all at once, while her older brother yanks white chunks out of cartilage lined crevices with the only tool he needs: his teeth. Corn on the cob sits cooked but idle, waiting for the pile of dusted red delight to give up the spotlight.

Maryland suffers from poorly built sandwich syndrome; its thin landmass pressed between the top bun of Pittsburgh, Gettysburg, Lancaster, and Philadelphia, and the bottom bun of DC, Shenandoah, Richmond, and Norfolk. New York City is only a 4 hour drive from our naval-steeped capital, and a brief jaunt south would have you in North Carolina before the sun fully lowered itself into a western bed. There’s a lot of artisanal bread for Maryland’s meat to contend with, and it knows it needs to taste damn good to get any attention when someone takes a bite of the East Coast.

The notes that haunt the humid air are distant but familiar – bluegrass, country, possibly Jimmy Buffet. The giant stock pot – already full of potatoes and garlic and onions – sits on open flame, slowly rising to boil as a bushel awaits fate. On the shore, seagulls have taken note of the feast, and caw their dinner bells to nearby friends, hoping to snag some scraps after the lungs, mustard, and empty shells have been tossed. As the sun begins to set, the hiss of bottle cap sighs fade into the backdrop of ten thousand cicadas.

You might expect a beer brewed with Maryland’s favorite crab seasoning to be nothing more than a well-marketed gimmick. But Flying Dog, after moving to Frederick after a few years in Denver, is one of the oldest functional breweries in the state. Like Heavy Seas and their nautical flair, Flying Dog understands what it means to be in this state, but also what it means to live in Maryland. What it means to wear purple during football season. What it’s like to contend with a parade of transient traffic as I-95 shuttles people to states external. What it’s like to pay a tax on rain.

Deposits of seasoning get stuck under your fingernails. Little cuts from shards and spikes sting when hands meet soap. The entire process means a lot of work and a lot of clean up, but the rewards, tangible and tantalizing, make the effort seem minor. Those who partake in the rituals of the bay go to bed satisfied, dreaming of food and friends and family and future.

The beer isn’t perfect; the smell hits you like a fishy breeze off of a populated wharf, and the Old Bay spikes a flag into your tongue, marking its savory territory despite the summer ale’s crisp attempt to quickly wash it down. But Maryland isn’t perfect either. It’s a hodgepodge of DC politicians and career fisherman, a swampy land swarmed with mosquitoes and mariners. Its weather can be extreme and unpredictable and relatively slow speed limits lead to some of the worst traffic in the country. But it’s a state that knows who it is, where it stands, and what it likes, by virtue of geographic necessity.

Flying dog tried to brew and bottle Maryland itself. Did it work? That ship’s still at sea. Either way, it’s a flattering homage, and I’m willing to bet a lot of Old Bay junkies just found the perfect partner for a summer romance.

“Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That’s the way the mind of man operates.” – H. L. Mencken

Beer n’ Books – The Craft Beer Revolution by Steve Hindy

Title: The Craft Beer Revolution
Author: Steve Hindy
ISBN: 978-1137278760
Pages: 272
Release date: April 22, 2014
Publisher:  Palgrave Macmillan
Genre: Nonfiction/History
Format: Hardcover
Source: Review copy

Growing up in a British expatriate household full of Oxford English Dictionaries and Encyclopedia Britannica, we playfully joked about our public school’s approach to teaching American history. My parents, products of northern England’s primary schools, found the way children were introduced to the political and social pedigree of early America both funny and fascinating. They’d look over homework assignments, amazed at how much detail was afforded to every battle, every colony, every document revision (as compared to British history), impressed at how thorough a retelling of events could be when it only had to cover a few hundred years, not a few thousand. But despite the depth they felt it often lacked applicability, that some of the history seemed forced, bloated to fill time and text book pages, with emphasis put on certain events to artificially inflate, not because of their influence of the founding of the nation.

They may have had similar concerns about Steve Hindy’s fresh release, The Craft Beer Revolution, which chronicles the rise of craft beer (defined as not the stuff from Miller or Coors or Budweiser) starting in 1965 and running up to present day. Forty-nine years isn’t an excessively long period of time to cover in 272 pages. The good news: their concern would have been misplaced. Although faced with the daunting task of sifting through pretty much all of modern America’s brewery, brewer, and beer-soaked history, Hindy manages to use his experience cofounding Brooklyn Brewing to condense and highlight many of the important aspects that led us to our fermented future. This is the journey of craft beer, told by one of its pioneers.

Those into beer know names like Jack McAuliffe, Fritz Maytag, and Ken Grossman, recognize that these men are the spiritual hop-wielding grandfathers of modern brewing. But to the layman, beyond a few photos, and a few too-often-used quotes, these men might seem two dimensional, spectres of a time when small brewing was as rare as organic labels in the grocery store. To the new beer enthusiast, these names might be completely alien.

While there are several other good reads that fall like wild yeast into the open fermentation vessel of “craft beer history” (namely, Ken Grossman’s Beyond the Pale, and Tom Acitelli’s The Audacity of Hops), Hindy gives a strong voice to the people who masterminded our current surge, connects the reader to them with quotes and anecdotes that color them as the decorated, dedicated brewers they were (or are). The strength of the narrative springs from the deep, insider knowledge of someone who was on the front lines of the transition from homebrewing and brewpubs to full-fledged breweries. Through Hindy’s research and interviews, a reader can feel like she’s standing right next to Charlie Papazian as he went from nuclear engineer to the head of the Brewer’s Association, and looking over Sam Calagione’s shoulder as he brewed the first of the beers that would eventually lead to Dogfish Head.

There are moments when my parents fears are realized, and Hindy’s content seems at odds with his structure; like a paragraph shoe-horned into the heel of a chapter solely because it was bristling with such potent information. At times, this gives a feeling of too much foot in too little shoe, description or notes inserted with little introduction or transition, just to round out a chapter. These sections, despite being clunky, do tend to add certain character to the narrative. It’s hard to fault Hindy for having too much good content, but it wouldn’t be a BJCP certified review to suggest I didn’t notice some defects in the body of the narrative.

These issues smooth themselves out by the middle of the book, just in time for the second act to dance onto the revolution stage: the politics of distribution and some infighting between regional competitors who should have, in a perfect beer-filled world, been allies. Some ire seems directed at Jim Koch of Samuel Adams; at one point Hindy calls him the “Harvard MBA-type” who seemed more concerned with marketing than establishing a local brewery, opting to contract brew in his early years, rather than establish physical roots. Later, he offers some admiration for Koch’s rise to commercial fame, but I’d venture that Hindy won’t be sharing a Utopias with Koch any time soon.

Ultimately, Hindy does an admirable job of writing a story that walks delicately between esoteric and approachable, telling the complex story of politics and law in beer in a way that wouldn’t completely turn off someone who didn’t already have a propensity for the bubbly stuff. The closing is cautiously optimistic, with Hindy suggesting (hoping) that Big Beer’s attempts to sneak in and snag market share with things like Blue Moon and Shock Top might actually lead to more business for smaller breweries, once the average consumer’s tastes evolve a bit more. Several jargon laden, industry heavy chapters might be harder reads for people who aren’t into beer, but by the epilogue, the book has done a fine job of capturing the inundation of American beer onto fertile consumer soil, and provides a deep, probing look at just how the river gained enough momentum over the past 50 years to successfully overflow its banks.

Beer Review: Left Hand Wake Up Dead Nitro

Apprehension settles in right around dusk. Shadows stretch for the long night ahead, laying a blanket down for some giant nocturnal picnic. In one last show of radiant glory, the sun slides into the horizon like bread into a toaster, continuing its never-ending journey to cook the planet to perfect brownness.

But the sun’s exit, stage West, heralds the time where I can’t continue my fight against sleep. Eventually, I’ll have to lie down, close my eyes, give into the merciless machinations that cobble themselves together in the flutters of my REM. Eventually, the dreams will come, and with them all those fiendish imps of imitation and devils of deception.

Every night for nearly 8 months now, I go to sleep only to wake up somewhere else, in a blurry pseudo-reality that’s simultaneously vivid and ethereal. Memories move like phantasms, fragments of what they should be, broken pieces of things I recognize, sewn together by my mind into a quilt of mismatched nostalgia. The rules of chronology abandoned, places and ages defy logic, and I’m with people in dream that I can’t be with in sun-soaked waking hours.

Every night I spend hours with my dad, chatting with him like nothing has changed, and every bitter morning I have to wake to that chest-tightening reality that it was only a dream. Of late our chats turn dour; he’s disappointed in how I’m handling things in his corporeal absence, chiding me for not stepping up, being the man he raised and expected me to be. The joy of seeing his mischievous smile quickly falls away to his ever-present disappointment and my ever-present guilt.

I know, rationally, it’s just my stress manifesting, snarling at me from behind an unforgivingly efficient cerebellum, but that doesn’t make the daily ritual of returning to dadless reality any easier to suffer. I know that dreams are not reality, but the lanes shift too often; so often that I start to wonder how real or unreal a dream really is when it pounds so insistently on the door to my psyche, even when I’m awake.

I’ve tried to fend off the dreams by running until my legs surge lactic acid, reading until my eyes burn with fatigue, even, despite acute awareness of the dangers inherent, drinking in hopes that a few quaffs from the silky sweetness of late night stout might offer respite and nepenthe from memories relentless.

But even a drink doesn’t lessen the pain. If anything my indulgence heightens the haunt, makes the sadness palpable, going up as the contents of the glass goes down. Counter to my hopes, it does nothing to inject some subtle nitrogen into brain, nothing to smooth out the harsh edges of my fear of falling asleep.

I always imagined ghosts being more tangible, something more inline with the white sheets and wispy mists of childhood fancy. I’d convinced myself that if lingering spirits existed, they could be caught on film, captured by technology and those brave enough to actively seek them. I never expected the supernatural to be homegrown in the garden of my imagination.

It turns out that ghosts are made of memories, flashbacks that flirt with your peripheral vision during the day, and only come out to play as full bodied apparitions once your body has given up for the day. They exist there, just as real as when they existed here, brought back to life by the power of your mind.

Every night, for 8 months now, I’ve dreamed dreams I don’t want, but can’t escape.

Every night, for 8 months now, I wake up dead.

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” ― Edgar Allan Poe

So you want to be a Beer Writer? – Part 2 – What are you reading?

If you’ve traipsed down the shadowy alley of writing advice, you’ve almost certainly come across the, “to be a better writer, you have to write!” obviousisms,  which are usually followed by the trumpeting accompaniment of, “but you have to read, too!” I’m not here to deny either of those pieces of advice. To be a better writer, you definitely do need to write, and possibly more than you’re writing now. To be a better writer you do need to read good writing, preferably more on the side of good books and essays and stories, and less on the side of Buzzfeed and TMZ and DailyMail.

What you read is just as (if not more) important as what you write. It gives you examples of excellent storytelling and wordplay. It offers perspective from another, educated angle. It shows you what it takes to write something marketable, that people will actually want to read.

One of the best aspects of being a beer writer is that you’re not really a beer writer. I mean you’re not only a beer writer. Our bubbly beau topically involves culture, chemistry, biology, sociology, psychology, economics, and all manner of other abstract intangibles like love and passion and modern facial hair styles. Beer is pretty close to an ideal nonfiction subject; the simple topics can be broken down into ever more complex and curious ideas almost infinitely, like a Russian Doll whose last, tiny form is located precisely wherever your imagination happened to run out of energy.

There’s a draw back to having so malleable a topic: to be successful you’ll need to know about more than just beer. Depending on what you want to write, maybe a lot more. If you so choose to don the hallowed robes of beer writing, you’re going to have become a science writer, too. And a memoirist. And a social pundit. And a journalist. And a critic. And an essayist. And maybe a bunch of other things I’m forgetting.

You’ve got to be a writer first and a beer lover second. The best way to do that is to round-out your bookshelf (or Kindle, if that’s what you crazy kids are into).

When I started my masters program, sitting in class with a bunch of other bright-eyed, crazy-minded writers all talking about their day-jobs and future writing prospects, it struck me that I was woefully under-read. My peers were throwing out author names and essay titles that I couldn’t even pretend like I’d heard of. I knew from the very first session of my very first class that I needed to start reading more. The only problem was, given the massive spread of options on Amazon and the daunting sprawl of stacks at the local library, I had no idea where to start.

If you’re like I was then, I’m here to help. I’ve created a list that includes my favorite books about beer, but also lots not about beer to serve as examples of great nonfiction. This list is by no means exhaustive, it’s just the writing I’ve connected to the deepest, and learned the most from.

(I also encourage you to throw out your favorites in the comments if you don’t see them here)

Science/Brewing Beer Books

Principles of Brewing Science – George Fix
For the Love of Hops – Stan Heironymous
Yeast – The Practical Guide to Beer Fermentation – Chris White and Jamil Zainasheff
Water: A Comprehensive Guide for Brewers – John Palmer
How to Brew – John Palmer

Beer Culture, Styles, and Tasting

The Brewmaster’s Table – Garrett Oliver
The Oxford Companion to Beer – Garrett Oliver
Beer Tasting Tool Kit – Jeff Alworth
The World Atlas of Beer – Tim Webb
Beer, Food, and Flavor: A Guide to Tasting, Pairing, and the Culture of Craft Beer – Schuyler Schultz
The Audacity of Hops – Tom Acitelli

Science/Food Nonfiction

Ominvore’s Dilemma – Michael Pollan
Botany of Desire – Michael Pollan
Oranges – John McPhee
Silent Spring – Rachel Carson
Stiff – Mary Roach
The Soul of a New Machine – Tracey Kidder

Other Nonfiction

Up in the Old Hotel – Joseph Mitchell
Bird by Bird – Anne Lamott
The Hero With a Thousand Faces – Joseph Campbell
The Golden Bough – James Frazer
Guns, Germs, and Steel – Jared Diamond
Walden – Henry David Thoreau
Devil in the White City – Erik Larson
The Perfect Storm – Sebastian Junger

Memoir

The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion
This Boy’s Life – Tobias Wolff
Don’t Let’s Go To the Dogs Tonight – Alexandra Fuller
Me Talk Pretty One Day – David Sedaris
The Pharmacist’s Mate – Amy Fusselman

Essays/Journalism

Strawberries Under Ice – David Quammen
The Search for Marvin Gardens – John McPhee
Frank Sinatra has a Cold – Gay Talese
Dark Horse – Lisa Couturier

I didn’t mention magazines because I’m still dipping my toes into that pool and can’t speak with much authority. You can’t really go wrong with The Atlantic, Smithsonian, NatGeo, or the New Yorker though.

Lucky 2.0

 A year ago today, I posted the original version of this story. I, and it, have since gone through many things together: publication at Outside In, thesis revision, several glasses of Jameson, several bottles of amber ale, achievement, loss, grief, recuperation. It’s been a hell of a three sixty five. 

I’m re-sharing this in part to show how important close editing is to the health of a story and a writer, but also just because I like it and it’s thematically appropriate.

Lucky

When he finally mustered enough courage, he looked up. He stood near the doorway of the old building, taking a moment to remember it. The dirty, butt-stained sidewalk that hosted dozens of drunk denizens who smoked in the Boston air, the flower boxes that sheltered and nurtured his mother’s favorite purple butterworts, the green and red knot work sign that proudly cast the name “Flaherty’s” over the tiny side street, all now burnt and hollowed out, everything ruined by smoke and flame and the power of unattended random chance.

If he hadn’t been late that morning, if he hadn’t been so slow to rise with head fogged by one too many late night whiskeys, if he hadn’t needed drink after drink to quiet his guilty conscience, James thought, maybe, just maybe when the piles of overdue bills in the unkempt kitchen caught those fledgling flames from that gas oven that should have long been replaced, he might have stopped it; not had to watch his father’s dream, an Irish life reborn and infused with Americanism, billow and ascend, smoke colored black by all that carbon and shame.

He imagined his father standing next to him, ginger hair turning grey at the temples. He’d looked almost like a fox in those last few years, still wily in spite of, and now svelte because of the cancer. Not that James had actually seen him outside of the pictures he’d found on the internet; he wasn’t even in the same zip code when that grizzled pater familias left the party early, lymphoma on his arm. He’d gotten the news from his second-cousin, late one night in a craythur haze, that the family name was now his alone. Still, Sean Flaherty hovered there unable to speak, but in his head, James could hear the vitriol his father would be slinging if he’d seen the fate of the bar he’d tended for near forty years.

The claims adjuster was late. James kicked at some fallen wood near the door, careful not to venture too far inside the shell of the building, worried that it was still in the middle of its death throes, still capable of collapsing any minute. The morning air gusted, picked up the scent of charred memories, kegs and coat racks and day-old beer. Inside the doorway he could feel the warmth still radiating off of the remains of the tall tables and long bar, all the stored energy seeping out of the wood like it was bleeding.

James lost focus at the sound of a car clumsily hopping up the curb while trying to park. A fat man, maybe twenty-nine, thirty, struggled to lift himself out of the driver’s seat. His pants were an inch or two too short, his tie a hideous spotted yellow, and his receding hair line barely visible in the stubble of his buzzed blonde hair. James could smell his Old Spice, old school, from five yards away. “James? James Flaggerty?”

“Flair-tee.” The mispronunciation of his name, his father’s name, at this moment, in this place, felt like dirty fingers in a fresh wound.

They stood outside the husk, peering into the darkness just beyond where the door had been. “Oh, sorry.” The adjuster turned to his papers, shuffled them to find a specific line on a legal-sized form, and then looked up. “Oh man. You’re lucky this fire didn’t jump to these neighboring buildings. That would have been an insurance nightmare.”

James kicked a beam of wood that had come loose from the siding and fallen onto the pavement, uncovering a half-burned coaster. A tiny shamrock, the only Irish cliché besides Guinness that his father perpetuated, was still clearly green and alive on the bottom corner of the cardboard. James did not smile. “Heh. Lucky.”

That night it felt wrong to sit in another bar, drink, even kind of enjoy himself. But the whiskey burned nice and the ice melted slow, and red ale chaser was just as his father would have liked: malty, crisp, sneaking hints of hops that lingered on his tongue. It was from his father he learned to drink, so it was to his father he drank the next one. And the next one. And the next one.

Each drink washed away another sin. In the first glass of single-malt he apologized for storming out so rashly, back in those eighteen-year-old days when he thought he knew everything and his father knew nothing. In the second, he cursed his father for leaving the pub to him, making him come back to this place fifteen years later against his better sense of pride. In the third, he found the courage to keep back the tears that had been welling since the police had informed him of the incident, the damage, the loss. In the fourth, he laughed, and ordered a fifth.

James didn’t stumble home, his careening so practiced that it was just one long graceful fall from bar stool to pillow. The whiskey normally stifled his dreams, but tonight they flared and seared, father and fire and failure all whirling together in an inferno of nightmarish scenes. He woke up, head pounding, throat dry, vomit lurching in his stomach, to remember both his father and the bar were, in the waking tangible sunlight of reality, gone.

His phone buzzed. He looked at the clock: 10:49. For a moment, he thought about letting his head sink back down into the pillow. The number was familiar, but not one that he’d stored in his phone. He waited for the third buzz, sighed, and answered.

“Mr. Flaggerty?”

The already horrible headache intensified. “Flair-tee. What can I do for you?”

The adjuster sounded even more nasal over the phone. “I just got the report from the fire marshal. I’ve got the final coverage numbers, but the inspector found something I think you should see.”

The pub looked less dejected now that the fire had completely gone out of her. Most of the debris that had fallen loose had been cleared from the entrance and the street. She looked scarred and damaged but somehow respectable, like she refused to give up so easily.

“Mr. Flag…Flair-tee. Thanks for showing up at such short notice. Most of the worst of the mess has been cleaned up, so if you’ll just step inside for a moment, I’ll show you what I was referencing earlier.”  The adjuster did his best to move gracefully through the rubble, trying to avoid getting his ill-fitting khakis stained by any soot. They passed the slumping, massive piece of oak that had been the bar; two patina-pocked tap stems, standing proud, the only things that seemed relatively undamaged by the fire.

Near a large hole between some broken floorboards at the back of the pub stood a walrus of a man, a man whose stature and uniform said authority but whose huge white mustache and kind eyes said grandpa. He looked at James then back down at the hole. “Did you know this room was here?”

Confused, knowing the back of the bar as only a place of refuge from the commotion of the patrons and the trajectory of drunkenly tossed darts, James didn’t know what the man was talking about. He inched closer, pushing past the combined girth of both inspectors, peering down between the broken floor boards. Boxes, clunky filing cabinets, three rows of large wooden shelves, and what looked like several beer casks lolling about in the dusty shadows.

“I’m going to try to climb down there.” The fire marshal huffed and recommended otherwise. Ignoring the man, who probably wouldn’t fit through the hole, James threw his legs over the edge, found his footing on the old wooden framing, and slowly lowered himself into the room below.

James used the screen of his phone as an impromptu flash light, shining it over the oak barrels with iron bands that rested on their ends, unmoving, like a dozen enormously fat men wearing belts too small. The blue light bounced through the surprisingly cavernous space, and the stone walls, all mildew and damp, radiated with eerie fluorescence. Three thin metal pipes came from the walls; forgotten hand-pull tap lines that at some point, years ago, had been connected to the casks that lined the rows of wooden racks.

Against the far wall, dozens of clear glass necks poked out of wooden crates in rows of six, columns of four. He grabbed a bottle and brushed away the dust and the ashes that had fallen from above. Eyes wide, trying to make out the text in the dark, he read the labels on the bottles. Tullamore, Bushmills, Midleton; ninety, ninety-three, a hundred and one years old, some even more ancient. All intact. Perfect, pristine. An army of golden soldiers in glass armor. He held an unspoiled fortune in his hands, felt the weight of years of Irish tradition, salivating over the idea of how much he could charge for even a shot of a vintage this rare.

The digital light made the place seem unnaturally cold, like a ghost had sapped the heat from the air. He imagine a specter of his Grandfather, hiding from the prohibition-crazed police, storing all his precious homeland still-runnings down here, beneath sealed floors, until they weren’t at risk of being poured out on the street as a warning to other bootleggers.  He shivered to think even his father didn’t know of this treasure trove, and that he may be the first living Flaherty to stand in this room in nearly half a century.

James moved to the filing cabinet. Years of rust and dust had seized the runners, but with a little force and a lot of curiosity, he slid the middle drawer open. He thumbed through the yellowing paper, tilting the phone to get a better look at the faded writing on each page. The first folder housed records, names and bills and income for years well before James was alive. The second folder was empty, except for an antique wooden-handled bottle opener. The third, packed nearly to the point of bursting, fell from his hands as he lifted it from the cabinet and spilled all over the floor.

At the sound of this, the fire marshal called to him, shining his flashlight down to see if James was injured. This beam of light caught the papers on the floor just long enough for James to read the titles: Flaherty’s Oatmeal Stout, Flaherty’s Pale Ale, Flaherty’s Irish Red Ale. Next to each recipe was a hand drawn green shamrock, perfect mimicry of the one his father so insistently included on anything associated with the bar.

The claims adjuster’s head appeared, upside down, from the hole above. “Are you okay? Looks pretty messy down here. You’re lucky you didn’t get hurt.”

James smiled, picking through the rest of papers that had spilled from the ancient brewer’s book, and thought for a second, he felt a hand come to rest on his shoulder. “Yea. Lucky.”

“My heart is quite calm now. I will go back.” – James Joyce