We used to go on a week-long beach vacation every summer. My entire family on the paternal side that is, sans my Grandfather who passed away before the tradition could start. There is enough material from these trips that could fill countless novels but I am reminded of one in particular today as the grocery store was out of my favorite brewskis and I had to settle for a cheap alternative.
Since my Grandfather passed on at an early age there have always been elderly ‘characters’ of varying degrees of carnival folk resemblance in orbit around my Granny. I do not know what their purpose was to her and I do not care to know. Most of the time these fellows scattered from the woodwork when the family would come around, but one beach trip, one of these ‘characters’ decided to show up out of the blue. Uninvited. Unannounced.
I had just come up from the beach and there in the kitchen of the rental house stood this slender, elderly gentleman, emitting a strong smell of cheap aftershave and tobacco. I don’t know if it’s true or not but I could have sworn he had cowboy boots and a bolo tie. He was drinking a beer and chatting with my Granny. I didn’t think anything of it, I had brought friends on vacation before so why not her.
The next morning while we were all drinking coffee I noticed this fellow was drinking scotch in his coffee cup. When we all went out to the beach he joined with a case of beer. Instead of wearing sunscreen he wrapped a towel around his head and left a small hole for his mouth where he would insert a cigarette and then put a five-gallon bucket over his head to light it, over, and over, and over again.
Don’t get me wrong, he didn’t look out of place. Instead of buying an umbrella like normal people, my Dad would set up a makeshift refugee camp on the shore with a tarp the size of an Olympic swimming pool and bamboo poles with an intricate array of jute twine to hold it up. Instead of kid-sized buckets and shovels to make sandcastles my Dad would haul the entire contents of his garden shed down there, tiller and all. So to say this fellow looked out of place with a towel on his head and a cigarette sticking out, not so much.
I’m not sure if it was the scotch in the morning, the towel around the head, or maybe something else but it all came to a head about halfway through the trip as we sat down for dinner one evening. This fellow was nowhere to be found. A search party was formed and he was located asleep in a bathroom. It wasn’t long after that he was politely asked to leave. He had obviously failed his interview as Granny’s gentleman suitor.
That was that, and nobody thought much about it until we got home. Before we went on these trips it was customary to pack the entire contents of our kitchen, so when we got home we had to reintroduce all of our items into their native habitat. Somehow it seems we had a hitchhiker in the form of a sixpack of the elderly man’s cheap, cheap beer. My Dad as frugal as he was could not throw it away so he put it in an outdoor refrigerator on the off chance he ran out of Sunday beer and didn’t want to drive to civilization.
A week to the day the old cowboy was excused from our vacation, my Grandmother got a phone call. Apparently the old man drove home, sat down on his sofa, and died. Surely he had a cornucopia of pre-existing conditions, but I like to think he died of a broken heart because he was so in love with my Granny.
Either way, the beer we put in the fridge transformed into something else. It was no longer cheap beer. It became known as “Dead Man’s Beer”. And there it sat to remind us what happens if you fall asleep on a bathroom floor, or fall in love with my Granny.