A real lady drinks Budweiser. At least that’s what my grandmother says.
On any given night, and by that I mean every night of the week, my grandmother starts her evening, at around 5pm, by popping open a can of Budweiser (mind you, the real stuff, not that Bud Light crap) and pouring it into a chilled glass. She keeps them flowing through the evening news on Fox, and then has some more during Jeopardy at 7pm. Occasionally, if Alex Trebek’s moustache is looking particularly well groomed, or if the Budweiser really hits the spot, she gets a little emotional. If I’m lucky on such an evening, she calls me to check in.
Many of my fondest memories from my childhood of my grandmother are associated with the most American of all beers. I can’t eat a pizza without tasting the sips of Bud that my grandmother would sneak me under the table, when I’d run over to sit on her lap. I can’t drive a car without remembering the time that we went out to dinner, and she had two Buds in a row. I was just 15, but she let me take the wheel on that fateful night, the night that possesses the fondest of my driving memories.
I was born in the Bronx, as were my parents, and their parents before them. I can only imagine that my grandmother’s predilection for Budweiser began one warm afternoon, in front of an ice box on the Grand Concourse, when she took a beer from the depths of the freezer, and had her first sips of the bitter nectar on her front stoop. I can only imagine that she drank Budweiser throughout my grandfather’s courtship, on the shores of Rockaway beach, near the hot dog stands of Coney Island, sunning herself on the banks of the Hudson River.
In my best of dreams, my grandfather saw my grandmother lounging on a hot summer day, her blond hair coiffed, her face turned towards the sun. He watched her as she lay, and he fell in love.
My best of dreams is directly derived from the scene in Raging Bull when Jake Lamotta, played by Robert Deniro first saw Vickie, played by the Irish beauty Cathy Moriarity (what a Celtic name!) lounging on the concrete shores of a public pool.
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