Previously: 40 Years in Beer, Part Eleven: The Fat Cats Deli & Pub was short-lived but inspirational.
One afternoon in August, 1987 an archaic device affixed to the wall started ringing. I lifted the plasticized receiver from its cradle, gently brushing against the numerical rotary dial.
(Recall that we lived in caves back then, brandishing big clubs to pursue brontosaurus steaks.)
The caller was my old pal TR, asking about my recently concluded second journey to Europe. We chatted about the trip, and then he suggested we continue the conversation over lunch at a new spot on Grant Line Road in New Albany—well, not exactly new, but recently changed. A moribund Noble Roman’s Pizza outlet had different management, and it was now a local eatery dubbed Sportstime Pizza.
I knew that TR and his father enjoyed bonding over meals at area restaurants, and could always be relied upon to provide informative reviews during this word-of-mouth era preceding internet ubiquity, so a couple of days later we met at Sportstime for pizza and soft drinks, as I couldn’t quite bring myself to consume draft Budweiser so soon after returning from Europe.
Verily, when people go to restaurants they tend to order their favorite meals, maybe hang out and socialize for a while, eventually pay the tab, and finally leave. Hopefully they’re sated and satisfied, and the result is a fair transaction for everyone involved, customer as well as the establishment.
For me, even if I didn’t know it at the time, this one brief experience of eating lunch at Sportstime with TR completely altered the trajectory of my entire life. That’s one hell of an impact for an ordinary pizza joint in forever somnolent New Albany, proving yet again that serendipity rules the world.
In the years to follow, life would start coming at me a great deal faster than before. I resisted growing up, and yet it happened anyway. In retrospect, those four months in Europe in 1987 retain a rarified glow as the culmination of my consciousness up to that point, and an indication of where I was headed next.
As such, I’ll be devoting several chapters of the “40 Years in Beer” chronicle to Euro ’87, beginning with this one.
As 1985 gave way to 1986, I’d reformatted my life around the stated prerequisite of traveling to Europe at least every...Read more
