The Gift That Keeps on Drinking
The Gift That Keeps on Drinking
Byrd Lynn’s Love
September 1, 2022
Summer’s End
If you only knew what’s it like to go three straight summers with no fun at all. No sunshine. No baseball. No beaches, bee hits, or Bee Gees tributes.
If you only knew. Then you, old friend, would take on board what I’m going through.
“Oh zip it!” The cashier lady at the liquor store says back to me as she rings up my Schlitz six-pack. “I saw you getting high at the beach with two sexy lifeguards just last week! Take your horrible beer and get lost, punk!”
I do as I am told and take my Schlitz and hop in the Datsun and drive home. I drink three beers while watching The Twilight Zone, the one about the lady whose face is wrapped in bandages and she begs them to let her just smell the garden. That one.
I doze off and then, about midnight, I am awakened by our dog, Byrd Lynn, barking because the door has opened and in walks the cashier lady from the liquor store. We’ve been together for three years and love each other with such unabashed passion that our neighbors have begged us to either move or get thicker insulation.
“Hello love,” I say to her.
“Give me a beer,” she replies and I comply and she sips her Schlitz as Byrd Lynn snuggles on her lap and she gives him a sip.
“Best summer yet,” I tell her. “Best summer since they first began.”
“At least since the bombs stopped falling,” she says. “At least since the war.”
“Which war?”
“Take your pick,” she tells me and sips her beer and smiles and I can see a motorcycle in her eyes, a baseball in her dreams, a beach in her memory, and long fingers softly combing through golden hair in her heart. --TK
Thursday, September 1, 2022