Bars with pool tables

      So Meg has just passed the mid-way point of her junior year of college.  So what was I doing then, thirty-some years ago?

   I remember going up to visit Bob, one of my roommates, who was at Middlebury for a semester that fall.  I got home to Vermont for one of our breaks a day or two before he got out for his.  I drove up to see him with my high school friend Kevin.  One of Bob's friends from Hotchkiss also was there, the infamous Henri LaBaum.

   We drank long-neck Budweisers at a little bar outside of town.  Bob wanted to go there because it had a pool table.  We put our quarters on the side of the table and drank two beers each while we waited our turn.  

   Bob and I played as a team.  We held the table for an hour.  Bob was pretty good.  I was occasionally lucky.  I made only the easiest shots, usually doing nothing more than whacking the balls around the table, or scratching, or both.  Except for the final shot of each game.  For three games in a row, after Bob had done all the work, I found myself in a position to sink the eight-ball for the win.  I made them all, including the final, impossible shot off two banks and into the side pocket.  Called and executed like I did it every day.  One of those moments when the buzz lifts, like a sudden pocket in the fog, and you see more clearly than you ever did when you were sober.  And you do the one, fine, perfectly elegant thing.  And smile casually as the fog settles in again.

   We sped back to town, cruised two of the college-crowd bars, drank more beer, pissed giddily into the gorge, and hit the Grand Union to buy a midnight feast of crusty bread and cheddar cheese and a box of chocolate chip cookies before collapsing back at Bob’s dorm.

   I have thought about that night from time to time.  I remember thinking that someday I would have kids who go off to college.  Kids who will find themselves in bars with pool tables and wake in the morning in the midst of empty bottles and the remnants of cookies and cheese.