It’s Pub Time

When I was in England I saw kids and dogs in pubs and I loved it. The pubs were gathering places for both social and political discourse and felt super warm and welcoming. When I was growing up in Wisconsin, there were no dogs in the bars but sometimes kids went in with their parents. On Sunday afternoons after my father, my mother, and I went on a Sunday afternoon drive, now and then we we would stop at the Chalet Hotel in the town of Three Lakes, about ten miles from where we lived. My parents each had a beer while I played a standup hockey puck game for ten cents, drank orange pop and ate potato chips. I called those outings “beering”. In those days in Wisconsin there “beer bars”. They didn’t serve hard alcohol and to drink, a person had to only be 18. When I was seven or eight, my sister who was eleven years older than I, was charged with babysitting on occasion. I was sworn to secrecy when she took me with her friends to an over-eighteen bar associated with a local resort. I’m pretty sure it would qualify as totally irresponsible but it was one of the highlights of my childhood, being with her friends. They plied me with orange pop and potato chips too, just to get my sister to be able to stay longer. It was as good as hanging around with the teenagers at the local soda shop, which I did a lot too, when she or my other sister were “babysitting”. The soda shop, I didn’t have to keep secret. None of that was in any way the same as the pubs in England or Wales but it made me think of it. I never saw belligerance or outright drunkenness in those British pubs, though I’m sure it happened. I loved visiting the pubs there and came away with a very positive image of them as community gathering places. I was there a bit before Covid and I guess germs weren’t a big deal because three times I had people offer me sips of their drinks so I could taste and compare different ales. Three different parts of the British Isles. Three different towns. Three different pubs. I took each person up on their offer.