Vagabond Vol.3 - The Bro-Grill Sessions
Our greatest memories are fermented and distilled, they age like fine wine, they taste like craft beer and slowly become more refined and flavorful with every year that passes. These memories sit long on the tongue, and it doesn’t take much time for the feelings they stir up to almost entirely replace the events themselves. I would be hard-pressed to recall dates or even specific discussions (outside of a few particularly raunchy and humorous ones) but I recall an undeniable nostalgia for the simple and playful non-sense of days spent at the park with the boys on a grill.
Such times were simpler times, there wasn’t exactly less going on but it did always feel like there was never a good reason to say no. Time was no more or less abundant, but the demands on it were undeniably less frequent.
Our twenty’s were the stuff of teenage day-dreams, with all the drinking and tom-foolary any young man could possibly want. Fridays nights were the stuff of drinking on the town and Saturday afternoons were the stuff of burgers, cherrezo sausages and a little hair of the dog for that lingering hangover.
Like all good things it started whimsically but became prolific in almost no time at all. It was simply too good, too pure, to pass on. Whether it was at GVP on the back-half, or Charlotte by the water, we were more than happy to light up the grill. In these days, we could spend a whole Saturday at the park, grilling, drinking, building fires and playing games. Times of genuine magic.
This sort of thing isn’t bygone per-se, but we don’t see it quite as well or as often as we used to. We’re not in the dawn of life or anything so defeated, but who exactly can commit the majority of an entire day to essentially, nothing? A reality I’ve found to be nearly universal is that life keeps rolling along, uninterrupted by things that don’t happen. The day may come where we simply can’t be bothered anymore, but I hope we’re closer to the start than the finish. Either way, it’ll be more fizzle than bang.
The ideal times are between May and Aug, which also just so happen to be the ideal times for everything else in Upstate New York, which further diminishes the likelihood of an impromptu occurrence.
If there isn’t wedding, a climb or an out-of-state adventure, there’s a fairly good chance we might end up at the park once again, with burgers and Blue Lights in hand.