#1
“8-1/2?” my mother asks hopefully. But it’s a foregone conclusion. Of course, 8-1/2.
We are home in my parents’ kitchen at eleven o’clock at night after picking up my sister and my nephew at the Nanaimo airport. It’s time for a snack and a drink, so we have some cheese and salad out, toastettes, pickled onions, and we are considering what to drink. We left before eating any dinner, around five-thirty-ish, to take the ferry, do some shopping, drive down the Island Highway, and wait an extra few minutes for the plane to get in from Vancouver. Driving home we chatted, E and J unwound, and I stared at the dimming light. Two in the car, however, were thinking digits.
Spelled out, e-i-g-h-t-a-n-d-a-h-a-l-f invokes little meaning to most. In my family, however, it says: “Would anyone like a half a beer?” (i.e. Would anyone like to share a half a beer with me?) It’s one example of the shorthand we developed over twenty years ago, at our family cottage north of Montreal. Patterns became so familiar, and behaviours so comfortable there, that we decided some of our more standard conversational interactions should be replaced with numeric code. Hence the time-saving eight and a half? (There were others: “Three the ______….” meant “Look at how beautiful the light looks on/through the _____….”)
My parents have nice little glasses that hold exactly 170.5 mL, plus clearance. That night, my mother and I, with my father amusedly looking on, reached forty-two-and-a-half.
#2
For five hot, steamy, asphaltish days this August, I worked a joyless food fest in Old Montreal, plumping for Slow Food within a white-vinyl-wrapped kiosk that redefined ‘slow cooking’. Fortunately, this gave me the opportunity to admire the grand and great food products generated by some of the talented artisans of québécois gastronomy. And since we were all baking together, the staffers at the beer booths were all too happy to share their wares at mildly reduced ticket prices. The upshot? A new appreciation for QC brewers and such heretofore-rejected innovations as rooibos- and ginger-infused lagers and mildly fruit-referencing ales. Plus, les Brasseurs de Montréal have some truly kick-ass graphics. (Cheap and easy, they told me. Effective and new, I say.)
#3
PBR in a can. In a case. 12 for $30. When I’m screaming my lungs out for Wrath Poutine and Smack Daddy, I don’t want no damn Dos Equis or Dieu du whaaaatevver. The Montreal Roller Derby League goes with crap beer and Doritos and THAT is a mutherfukkin food and wine pairing. No good, no clean, but very fair. Get over your shit and drink.
#4
So we’re driving down the autostrada, somewhere in Le Marche, or maybe on our way to Milano. I don’t know. The bus stops at the Autogrill (a Benetton subsidiary), and we toddle out dutifully for lunch. The options, surprisingly, are great. Good quality prosciutto and other cured meats, cheeses, bread, salad, fresh-made pasta. Wine by the glass or carafe. In the shop there are whole salami, artisanal pasta, chocolates, and other local and tee-pee-cal products. Lots of wine, and though it might not be enoteca-quality, it’s many notches above Dep wine.
The Autogrill phenomenon is distinctive, and in Italian family culture occupies the same space as the McDo and BK rest stops that pepper the turnpikes of North America. To this day, the tarmac pulloffs engender a warm feeling of being on the road, going somewhere together, speeding forward in conviviality. They play on the heritage of our youth, and they sell.
One product they sell is the wildly imaginative Italian product, Drive Beer. On the exit ramp, big signage promotes the local specialty. The perfect 2.5% pick-me-up at 180 kph. Endorsed by a famous Italian race-car driver (previously arrested for drunk driving), it synthetically and triumphantly encapsulates all the yummy contradictions of Italy, of morality, of commerce, of taste, of celebrity, of impracticality, of tra-dee-shun, of pleasure. Drive. Beer.
Ciao!