As I've watched my daughter cheerfully prepare, I've been thinking of this 2011 Suburu ad which broke my heart the first time I saw it:
The ad hit home then (and still resonates today) because I was that dad, and my daughter was that daughter, and after she got her license, I watched her disappear down the road with the same feeling of helplessness the dad in the commercial has.
For me, that day started with a trip with my daughter to Pasadena shortly after her sixteenth birthday for her final driver's test. We rode together to the Department of Public Safety, got there and checked in, then returned to the car and pulled into a queue to wait our turn for the test.
I waited in the car with her, gave her some last-minute pointers, and then got out and stood on the sidewalk, watching. Eventually, a trooper got into the car with her and they drove off. I watched the car disappear around the corner of an adjoining street and hoped that she would do well.
She returned to view about five minutes later, pulling into the DPS parking lot and approaching the parallel parking poles. There's an urban legend that you can pass everything else in the driving test, but if you hit the curb or either of the poles during your parallel parking test, you instantly fail and have to try again another day. I don't know if that's true, but I'd heard it enough that I held my breath while I watched her try.
She eased back into towards the slot, turned, and turned again, and stopped. She wasn't perfect - she ended up about nine inches from the curb - but she passed. I exhaled.
After she got her temporary license, I got into the driver's seat, and we drove to our insurer's office to get her added onto our policies. After that was done, we drove home.
I pulled into the driveway. Looking down at her phone, she said, "Katelyn wants to celebrate."
"Sure," I said. "Let's tell Mom, and then we can all get some lunch."
"No, Dad. Just me and Katelyn."
"Oh," I said.
We got out of the car, she got in the driver's seat, and I leaned over (just like in the commercial) and told her to be careful. She smiled, backed out into the street, and then zipped off, this tiny mercurial girl enveloped by glass and metal and combusting gasoline, a thousand terrible things waiting to happen out there, not even wearing a helmet.
It's been a while since then. She's now about to go to college, she has a boyfriend and a regular part-time job, and to the objective observer, she's a full-fledged adult woman.
But in my eyes . . . she is still the tiny mercurial girl that I watched that winter afternoon, driving off into the world, oblivious to the dangers of the world, a gleeful smile on her face, and I am the proud, loving, and helpless dad in the driveway, hoping for the best.
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The boy she is dating, a tall handsome blond kid with a good sense of humor, is on the swim team at their school and will be attending UT in the fall.
As it happens, I was a tall blond kid with a good sense of humor who was on the swim team in high school and attended UT. That's what worries me: I know exactly what this kid is thinking, and if it involves my daughter, I want to roll her up in bubble wrap and get a possessive pit bull to stand guard over her.
He came by one day as I was in my home office and introduced himself.
I asked him which strokes he swam. Backstroke and freestyle, he replied.
As this conversation was proceeding, I was engaged in my own conversation with myself, playing out the various lines of questioning, trying to decide what would work the best. This is something that some of us lawyers are particularly good at because we're always evaluating where the next question is going, and where the next answer will take us, and editing on the fly.
In this case, I was trying to decide between the tough-guy Don't Break My Daughter's Heart or I'll Snap Your Neck persona or the slightly nicer We're All Buddies Here, But Seriously, Don't Break My Daughter's Heart or I'll Snap Your Neck persona. I liked this kid, so I went with the latter approach.
"I was on the swim team too," I said. "My PR on the 50 free was 23.6." (Actually, I don't know if that's true - it was something like that, but my recollection of my true personal best time fluctuates from 23.4 seconds to 24.6 seconds, depending on how desperate I am to impress.)
He nodded and we talked swimming for awhile. I showed him a picture of me on the team.
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| Me in 1981: second from the left, top row. |
"You had a lot more hair back then," he said.
"Uh, yeah." I started rethinking my We're All Buddies approach.
My daughter stood in the doorway, knowing what I was thinking. "Daddy, he's not here to talk to you. Let's go!"
We shook hands and he left. Since then, I've beat him in chess and water basketball, and he declared that I was "way cooler" than he thought I was when he saw my badge from work. Although I kind of recognized the backhanded nature of that comment ("way cooler" than what?), and my daughter told me that she thinks he let me win those games, I choose to believe that the old lion still has some teeth.
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On an actual beer topic, next week Saint Arnold Brewery releases its Divine Reserve No. 14. When and where the bottles will turn up is a mystery, however.
The Divine Reserves are Saint Arnold's one-off limited release specialty beers, and over time, getting a six-pack or a bomber has become its own event, a scavenger hunt for beer aficionados. The smart hunters use Twitter with the hashtag #DR14 and wait for the word to get out about when a shipment arrives nearby. Here's a good article about the search process in the Chronicle.
My co-worker Brian and I will be monitoring the availability of the beer and if the conditions are right, we may just dash out of court proceedings to get a couple of six-packs on Monday morning. When we do get some, I'll do a special review.
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One other thing. Last Saturday was Record Store Day, so I went to Cactus Records near Shepherd and 59 to see what was up. The ad said that there would be live music, and that they would be serving Saint Arnold Santo, and there were supposed to be some deals. So, being the cheapskate I am, I seized the opportunity.
Although I get most of my music these days online, I think I was inclined this year to go to Record Store Day because (1) I have a love/hate relationship with Internet stores (I think we're slouching towards total depersonalization of commerce, which is bad for society); and (2) I wanted to relive my old college days in Austin, when the local record stores would have their once-a-year super-sales and you could get a new LP for $3.99 or less. We'd brave the crowds and pick the store clean. I remember loading up in my first such sale in the basement store at Dobie Mall, getting Brian Eno's Before and After Science, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's self-titled debut, and a compilation record that included Adam Ant and Siouxsie and the Banshees.
(Did I say that I went to college in the Eighties? And now you know.)
I visited Cactus last Saturday after playing basketball. I had changed my shirt, but I still had the post-workout funk and I hoped to be in and out, maybe with a cold one and a couple of CDs. I lucked into a pretty good parking spot and ambled in, no line at the door, about 1:00 p.m.
When I walked in, I saw a poster for the Ry Cooder Live in San Francisco CD and immediately started jonesing for that record. (Ry Cooder is the world's greatest slide guitarist, and he was doing worldbeat explorations decades before Paul Simon and David Byrne did.) I found the CD in a rack, costing probably about six dollars more than I would have paid on Amazon, but I was in the spirit of the day, so I picked it up.
I also found a used CD of Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club in 1963, one of the greatest soul concerts of all time (only James Brown Live at the Apollo might be better, but that depends on what your mood is). I hadn't listened to it in twenty years, so I grabbed it too.
I then found myself at the end of a line that appeared to be something related to Record Store Day with about twenty-five people. So I got into it. Shortly afterwards, I turned to two guys who were behind me in line as we approached the tables and I asked them what I was in line for.
"Um, this is the line for the Record Store Day merch."
"Uh-huh. What merch?"
"The stuff they're selling today, sir." (Throughout the conversation, one of the guys kept calling me "sir" even though he looked to be about thirty-five. The other guy just looked at me as if I was slightly demented.)
I looked at the tables, but all I saw were some t-shirts and some small picture disks.
"What are they selling?" I asked.
The guy I was talking to got excited. "Well, we were at Vinal Edge [editor's note: that's the correct spelling, by the way] before here and we got a Devo concert disk from 1977. The cover is excellent."
"Any CDs?"
(I later found out that this one question marked me as a fogey more than my graying hair, my growing middle, and my total lack of style.)
He paused. "Um, they have the new Pixies CD, sir." The other guy rolled his eyes.
I finally got to the table, where an impatient clerk asked me what I wanted. I saw a box of vinyl records behind him, but nothing was displayed, no labels, no poster. Apparently, you were supposed to know what they might have and that was the fun of Record Store Day - knowing to ask for a special release and, by chance, maybe actually getting it.
I asked about the only special release I knew about. "Do you have the Devo record?"
"Which one? Max's Kansas City or 'Gates of Steel'?"
"Um, both?"
He turned around and pulled Devo Live at Max's Kansas City - November 15, 1977 from a box on the floor. From a different box, he pulled out a gray vinyl 7-inch single with Devo performing "Gates of Steel" on one side and the Flaming Lips performing it on the other side.
"Anything else?"
I couldn't think of anything to say, so I shook my head, took the records, and moved down the line to the next table. There I saw a David Bowie picture disk, a single of the song "1984." It looked cool, so I asked the next clerk for one.
"That's the last one," she said, smiling. I took it.
Time to pay. I looked for the cash register. There was a line disappearing around the corner into another room. I went into the other room. The line snaked around the room, about 150 people.
Now what? I had two CDs, and three apparently rare vinyl records, and I was going to have to wait about an hour to pay for them. Or I could leave, knowing that I didn't have a working vinyl record player anyway, no loss to me.
(In retrospect, I now realize I was acting like this guy.)
I got in line. We moved at a stately pace around the room, and I struck up a conversation with the guy behind me. He was holding a couple of LPs by bands I did not recognize. We talked about our hauls and then he said something that made me feel really, really old.
"Look at all of these CDs!" he said, gesturing towards the racks and laughing. "I don't know anyone who buys CDs anymore. I get all of my music on Spotify. This is old technology." He drew out the word "ooooooold" as he said it.
I chuckled and nodded in agreement, slowly shifting my Sam Cooke and Ry Cooder CDs behind the Devo LP.
We eventually got to the cash register, stopping midway as we passed a guy pouring cups of Santo, which was cold and refreshing, particularly since I was still in my basketball gear and hadn't had anything to eat or drink since breakfast. Beer: lunch of champions.
And now I own these vinyl records. And now I have to decide whether to buy a record player, and whether I should break the seal on these special releases, or hold them as collector's items. I'm not sure I get the fetish of vinyl, but I have a closet full of old LPs that haven't been listened to in decades. Maybe it's time to dust them off and see what I've been missing.
And on Record Store Day next year, maybe I'll know what to ask for.
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This week's beer is the Black Chocolate Stout from the Brooklyn Brewery. If you remember from my discussion of the history of IPAs, stouts used to be what beer was, a product of the "kilning" of barley malts in ovens to stop germination. Because kilns were not terribly sophisticated back in the day, the malts often turned very dark and passed along that color and taste to the finished product.
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| (c) JDurfee99 |
This is a beer that begs to be paired with cured meats and cheeses. I almost want to go to a Renaissance Festival and buy a smoked turkey leg to gnaw on while I drink this. I want to grow a thick beard and bushy eyebrows and wear hand-tanned animal pelts and . . . well, you get the idea.
According to the always-helpful tasting note on the label:
In the last century, British brewers made strong stouts for the Czar's Court. They were called Imperial Stouts. Our Black Chocolate Stout, brewed once yearly for the winter season, achieves a chocolate aroma and flavor through the artful blending of six varieties of black, chocolate, and roasted malts.
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| (c) JDurfee99 |
I like this beer. In fact, I like it enough to make it our new champ. So long, Lenny's Bittersweet - you had a great run, but there's a new big dog in the house.
In fact, as I stand in line on Monday for the Divine Reserve No. 14 at Spec's, I might very well pick up another bottle or two of the Black Chocolate Stout as well as a whole salami to bite into as I drink it in the parking lot. (That's a joke, by the way, if my boss is reading this: I don't actually eat salami during office hours.)
See you soon!
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