What I did during my summer vacation

I toured the South by car during July, getting out of town over the July 4th week rather that watch the spectacle of our president bringing tanks onto the Mall to shore up his lilliputian affect.  In August I toured the midwest by car for a few days.

In western Pennsylvania I drove by a beer distributorship on a back road that just begged me to come on in.  It was a time machine that transported me back to the decade when I was an adolescent standing in line at the corner candy store, buying sugar daddies and Mad Magazines, and the next decade when I was making midnight runs to the supermarket to lay in a six-pack of beer for the late movies on TV, which, when they ended, the station played the national anthem and then went to a hissing snow field for the rest of the wee hours of the morning.

This place had the register alcove stacked with bubble gum cigars, candy cigarette packs, boston baked beans and best of all, those tiny wax bottles of colored fruit nectar that you would bite off the top and drain the 1 ounce of syrupy colored sugar water for refreshment on hot summer days.  But they also had beer in that vast warehouse space, brands that I knew well as a young man in New York where the drinking age was 18 then and that I hadn't seen in decades since then.

Schaeffer, Schmidt, Knickerbocker, Rheingold and Schlitz.  I happily laid in a case of Schmidt and thought that perhaps I would come back next year and maybe they would have Ballentine and Valley Forge beer.