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JLH: One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer
One of my small pleasures throughout the summer has always been having a drink out in the yard, letting the dog (later, the dogs) roam around, and just enjoying the late afternoon light. When I worked at an office downtown, this was always a bit of a hurried process, on the days I actually got to enjoy it. I'd have maybe ten minutes before I needed to get inside and get supper on the stove, as I've always taken care of the cooking in my relationship. But on weekends, I'd get more time. We'd have tea at 2 or 3, and then I could go outside and watch my lovely, late dog do his route around the yard, stopping at the lillies, the bush, the pine tree, the other bush. I could sip my beer, watch the light play through the leaves.
And then at some point in the year, something in me flips. I don't have a beer in hand anymore, I've got a finger of whisky. Sometimes Irish, often bourbon. The trees lining the streets have gone gold and crimson. The fallen leaves are brown and curling. There's a rustle as my dog walks through the grass.
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The story of how I starting drinking alcohol is, I think, probably fairly similar to a lot of other people: my parents drank. Not a lot, but regularly; and, I often joke, in a very European way. Wine with Sunday dinner. Beer or wine with supper every night. A cocktail before supper, with whisky for my dad, gin and tonic for my mother. Closer to Christmas, dinner would be followed by cookies and small glasses of port.
When I got old enough I had a little wine with Sunday dinner, and a sip during the Eucharist. My muscle memory still knows the feel of how I cupped my hands kneeling at the altar, even if I haven't done it in twenty-five years. And none of this took: I think I've bought two, maybe three bottles of wine for my partner and myself in my adult life. She doesn't like it, either. She barely drinks at all.
As for me, well, I have a drink most days, but never wine. I've always had a fondness, a weakness?, for whisky and beer.
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Beer is easy to explain: I hated it until I didn't; my first beer was a Heineken, which I still hate. For three fateful weeks I worked as a dishwasher. I was eventually fired (that's not important), but at the end of my first shift, as I was sweating profusely, one of the chefs handed me a Grasshopper, told me the first shift was always the hardest.
I've never had a beer that cold or that good since.
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For years in university, I drank beer. Mostly Keith's, an awful Canadian beer from the years before craft brewing really took off. It labels itself an "India Pale Ale", though it certainly isn't. It's a generic lager that tastes a bit better than the average macrobrew equivalent (Canadian, Blue, Kokanee, etc). It's slightly better on tap. And so as I was starting university and learning about English and French literature, differential calculus, and astronomy, I'd come home after twelve hours on campus, crash in front of the family computer, wait for ICQ and AIM to load, and have a beer. Put on some downloaded music in WinAmp and unwind.
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Hard alcohol has always had that whiff of the scandalous. In high school, the jocks in my English class would talk to each other (loudly) about where they'd partied last weekend, who they'd fucked, what they'd been drinking. Rum and Coke, rye and Coke, shots of Jägermeister. If you drank liquor, you were a man. I remember in one class, the students who'd just come back from the German exchange, talking about how they'd bought bottles of Schnapps, went down to the river, got drunk and spent the afternoon watching the clouds pass.
I'd never wanted to speak German so badly in my life.
But for years, I'd barely had hard liquor. The first: a sip of Bailey's at a friend's house, at New Year's - I must have been twelve? I immediately spat it out. Then at a party thrown by a bunch of musicians at the end of high school, downing a few shots of spiced rum, and feeling it. The thought of spiced rum still kind of turns my stomach. And then, nothing. Throughout high school, I never really had much money. I had to pay for my own internet connection. I was more concerned with figuring out how to pay for tuition and books with my minimum wage job that paid $6.45/hr. If I had money for alcohol, I'd rather have beer.
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When I was a student, there were really only two places we'd go for a beer: at the campus pub, which was convenient, but felt like drinking in repurposed office space; and at a pub near my house, which was done up in that very traditional North American way, a fake English/Irish pub, impossible to tell which.
Mondays you could get a burger, fries, and a small beer for $5. We went there a lot of Mondays, then went back to the lab, and got to work on our assignments.
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The years passed. My first year went very well. I decided on my major. The next two years were an asskicking. I didn't do _badly_, but I didn't do well, either, not well enough for someone who secretly harboured aspirations of becoming a professor.
My fourth year I started to turn things around. Got better grades, watched my average creep up. One night, downtown, and at a different fake Irish pub, one of my friends/classmates came back from the bar with a glass of whisky.
"Try this," he told me. "If you don't like it, I'll pay for it."
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I can still faintly remember the inside of that pub, or at least the rough layout, in that faint, mostly colourless way that my visual memory works. I can't visualize much. But I can still remember the taste of that whisky, Glenmorangie 10 year. Smooth for a Scotch. Decades later, still my favourite whisky.
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Whisky, for me, has been something of a slow burn. After my fourth year, I stopped being a broke undergraduate and switched to being a broke grad student. I had enough money for the odd beer, but certainly not a $60 bottle of whisky. And after I was a broke grad student, I started a PhD, and was so poor I had $30/week for groceries.
Whisky would have to wait.
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The story of how I gave up academics is probably uninteresting, but still one of the central stories of my life. I'll be brief: I was poor, I was alone. I finished my first year. I was staring down three or four more.
In the face of that, I couldn't. I only had one friend in the city, an old online friend who I'd finally got to meet in personal. School was a slog, there was no finish line, and my passion was gone. My relationship had turned long distance, and it was dying; faced with the choice of my academic dreams or love, I chose the latter. That spring I watched the pack ice flow down the river and I made my own plans to leave.
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I moved across the country. I got a job with a salary and some benefits. We bought a house. The first few months I was still broke. We had furniture to buy: a new bed, a proper dresser, a couch. And then things started to turn. I started to see movement in my bank account; I started to have a little money left over.
I tried whisky again, and realized (or maybe remembered) how much I liked it. I bought Ballantine at first because it was cheap, and my mother's brand. I got Teacher's from time to time, since that was my grandfather's favourite. Then that first Christmas in the new city, I treated myself to a bottle of Glenmorangie 10 year. And I've tried many since, but Glenmorangie for me will always taste like friendship in a dark pub, a new life in a new city: happiness and possibility.