Am I Old?

🍻Happy Hour! 4- 7pm🍻

I sometimes ask myself, “Am I old?”

I’ll be right in the thick of it when I realize— I’m too old for this shit, or, I don’t belong here anymore. We’ve all seen the old guy at the party, and nobody wants to be him right?

I was thirty the first time this happened to me. We were in Athens after a UGA game. There’s nothing like fall Saturdays in Athens, Georgia!

It was a big game, so the kids didn’t come along— The big games tend to be a tad more rowdy, if ya know what I mean. Plus, tickets are much more expensive. So it was just me, my sweetheart, and one of my good friends. The Dawgs won, and the students were ringing the Chapel Bells as everyone was making their way from the stadium to downtown.

We were totally swept up in all the excitement, “I said it’s great, to be, a Georgia Bulldawg!” Repeat 100+ times, arm in arm with 96k comrades– And before we knew it, we were through campus and entering Broad Street from underneath The Arch.

Now it’d been a couple years since we’d partook in this end of the celebration. When you’ve got kids with you, you’re heading straight to the minivan after the game, not downtown. But on this Saturday night, we were primed to party!

We get downtown, and file into a bar we were quite familiar with— Although now it bears an unfamiliar name. Once inside, it immediately feels different than I remember. Awkward in a way that’s hard to explain. And it wasn’t just me, I could tell that my companions felt it too. We may have only been a handful of years older than most of the kids in that bar, but we were light-years away in Life. There was no denying it– We did not belong.

After one beer we left that bar for another. But encountered the same weirdness, so after just one beer there we decided to go to The Grill for a burger. Btw- I highly recommend The Grill, if you ever go to Athens, GA. Their burgers are cheesy & greasy, just like you’d expect to get in a college town diner. We walk in and order before heading over to a table, just as we’d done many times before. But this time there’s an issue— When I order our beers and hand the college aged student mine and my 28-yo sweetheart’s ID, the girl glances at them and hands them right back to me saying that she can’t serve her.

She turned to my wife and said, “That’s not your ID, I can’t serve you.”

Now, you can imagine how well that went over with Wifey— She was PISSED. In a quick effort to calm the brewing storm, I tried to reason with the kid, “Think about it,” I said. “Look, we’re both wearing wedding rings, the surname on the licenses match, we’re obviously the two people on these IDs.” But it made no difference, my wife had dyed her hair from blonde to black. There was no way that little girl was going to serve her a beer. So we were forced to share mine, thrice.🍺🍺🍺

The next day we reluctantly admitted to one another on the four hour ride home that we’re just too damn old to go downtown after the games anymore— We don’t belong.

Well, last night I had the opposite experience. Actually it was more like afternoon, let’s call it evening.

I’d asked my sweetheart if I could take her out on a date as I was walking out the door for work y’day morning. She said, “we’ll see,” and gave me a kiss😘

Then when I got off the tractor and home early, we decided to go to Chilli’s Bar & Grill. They’ve got happy hour from 4-7pm everyday, and we both love a bar stool and a draft.

We walk in at about 5:30pm and there are only two empty seats at the bar. The bar area is spilling over in retirees! I mean, you’d think Chilli’s Happy Hour was for Senior Citizens only. For a moment, I thought we’d teleported to The Villages.

We sit down at the bar, have a couple beers and apps and are full and finished by 7pm. But while we were sitting there people watching, I couldn’t help but think about that last night partying in downtown Athens. How this was an inverted version of that night— Yeah sure, we’re probably thirty years younger than most of the folks in here; but we fit better in here today, than we did in those bars after that big win.

So, what did we do afterwards? We went bar hopping of course!

Na, just kidding. On the way home we called our daughter and arranged to go pickup our grandson to spend the night. That’s right, we spent the remainder of our date as PeaPaw and Lovie, and I wouldn’t swap it for anything in the world.

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