Tradition Revisted

My first job out of college was in Omaha, Nebraska, and I developed the after-work tradition of sitting out in the back yard each night with a cigarette and a beer while I was cooking dinner. Back then I did the kind of dinner-cooking that actually allowed time for the consumption of beer and a cigarette, unlike the five-minutes-in-the-microwave cooking that I do now.

Now that it appears to finally be spring for real and not just as a protracted (and repeated) April Fool's Day prank, I'm suddenly waxing nostalgic. But six weeks without Taco Bell and Milky Ways taught me the finer points of resisting temptation, so I managed to make it home (2.5 miles -- I love my new job) without stopping to buy a pack of cigarettes.

I grabbed a beer and headed out onto my back deck, which is usually as sadly neglected as my poor blog. On this particular night, however, I was joined by two dogs (neither of them mine), a baby (definitely not mine), and my neighbor (owner of one of the dogs and father of the baby). As I tried to juggle beer and laptop without accidentally locking myself out, my downstairs neighbor's adorable puppy squeezed past me into the kitchen and promptly began eating the cat food. My alpha-male, dog-averse cat took this surprisingly well, and I managed to get the puppy back out the door in one piece. I spent the rest of the evening nursing my beer and watching the baby unwittingly feed crackers to the dogs, while my cat sat wide-eyed and defensive on the other side of the security door.

I thought this post might turn into a long, rambling reflection on how much my life has changed since the summer of 1997, when my grandmothers were still alive and Google didn't exist yet (and yes, I did google Google to find this out for sure). But then my dad called, and all the words that I might have poured out onto the screen ended up in my conversation with him, so I'm honestly left with just one profound thought: a cold beer on a warm afternoon still tastes every bit as good as it did in 1997.