Three Beautiful Things 12/12/15: Grandpa Popcorn Returns, Return to D C Brau, All's Right with the World

1.  While their parents took care of Christmas errands they wanted to do without their children, Olivia and David spent the afternoon with me and and the Deke and I got to help reward them for joining the Deke and finishing a Christmas crafts project by once again becoming Grandpa Popcorn and popping up a small hill of happy making popcorn.

2. I enjoyed being in Idaho and Oregon over the month of November, and, at the same time, I missed drinking the beers of Maryland and D. C.  This afternoon I sprung into the Subaru and glided down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway and snaked around on Ft. Lincoln Road to Bladensburg Rd and dropped in on the tasting room at D C Brau.  I enjoyed a slow, most satisfying pint of Corruption IPA and then I bought a growler and had it filled with Corruption IPA and bought a sixer of my favorite of all porters, Penn Quarter. The concrete tasting rooms, in full view of the brewing operation, were teeming with twenty and thirty somethings, about half a dozen with babies in tow and another two or three were pregnant (and not drinking) and I smiled inside as I watched all these young people enjoying their beer and earnestly talking about things that matter, occasionally breaking into laughter, and somehow, for a moment, the future seemed bright and the world, at least in this little run down corner of NE Washington, D. C.. seemed a pretty good place to be.

3. I continued to feel good about the little world I live in and about the people around me as the evening continued and I arrived at the Diazes to pick up the Deke.  They'd been to a Girl Scout ice skating party in College Park and the children were going to bed and Molly, Hiram, the Deke, and I sat around the dining room table and talked about everything from raising kids to ideals of beauty while finishing off the jug of Corruption IPA I purchased at the brewery and, for this evening at least, I felt like joining with Robert Browning's Pippa and proclaiming, without irony,  "God's in His heaven -- All's right with the world!"