With a capital T

Holy crap you guys it just occurred to me: you know how in the U.S. the national drinking age is 21 and most bars are open until at least 2 a.m. and so college kids will often go out on the night before their actual 21st birthday and the bouncer will usually let them in because as soon as it hits midnight they can legally buy alcohol and indulge in their first couple of hours of state-sanctioned drinking? Right?

Today is St. Patrick's Day, or as those of us who know our way around an ale or two call it, "Amateur Night".

Tomorrow is the bino's birthday.

Birthdays and St. Paddy's are fixed dates. They don't move around on the calendar based on lunar cycles or the desire for federal holiday three day weekends. My little girl, for example, has had her birthday fall near and far from Easter, including right on it once, but I couldn't tell you off the top of my head, for example, when the next time the conjunction will be.

BUT I can say with absolute certainty that if the bino's friends take him out the night before his 21st birthday in order to do shots at midnight, they will be attempting such a maneuver ON ST. PATRICK'S DAY. Which, by the by, in that year will fall ON A FRIDAY NIGHT.

Holy. Crap. You. Guys.

One reason why this fact has eluded me so far may have something to do with an ironic recent development: the bino, at the ripe old age of 8, has taken a pretty strong anti-alcohol stance. He hates it, and will declaim as much loudly and often. He does not find Homer Simpson funny in the slightest. And he gives me and my wife a lot of guff about our own imbibing.

Of course this can and probably will change over the next decade or so. I don't remember feeling the way he did at his age, my parents drank and I just accepted it as the way things were, but he is his own person and has to chart his own course. Maybe his 21st birthday's adjacency to Amateur Night will end up mattering on some level, and maybe it won't. Time will tell, we shall see, too ra loo ra.

Another layer of irony here is that his hardcore teetotaler stance has really solidified over the past year. As in, 375 days and counting of Pandemic Life. So, yeah, full disclosure, we've been doing a fair bit more drinking at home over the past year than any time earlier. It's been a year in which my wife got me a beer box subscription for my birthday AND my dad got me a completely different beer box gift card for Christmas. It's been a year of staying in on the weekends instead of getting a sitter and going out, but still enjoying a glass or two of wine or some bourbon or dark rum based cocktail or other while we watch a streaming movie and order in pizza. It's been, in short, a bit of a year.

It's also been a year in which my wife has still had to go to campus to run lab sessions for her job, which both increases the need for relaxation rituals and makes the schedule a bit odd, to boot. This semester, for instance, my wife is on campus for early morning labs Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Fridays she works from home, but for all intents and purposes she considers Thursday her personal Friday night for unwinding with a choice beverage or two. I bring this up only to point out yet another ironic convergence, as tomorrow happens to be a Thursday and, as mentioned above, is also the teetotalling bino's birthday. So! We have settled on a compromise: my wife and I will be enjoying some fine Irish beers together tonight, in honor of the holy man Padraig, and on Friday my wife likely has plans with a small COVID bubble of her friends which will also involve libations. But on Thursday, on the bino's birthday, there will be no drinking. We can be abstemious for the one day that's supposed to be all about him. At least, that's the compromise my wife and I came up with, we haven't exactly submitted it to the bino for approval as such, but I'm sure he'll be on board with minimal amounts of guff.