1. If you read this blog, whether regularly or from time to time, you know that I've been dealing with chronic kidney disease for over sixteen years. You also know that I was very ill in 1973 with toxic pneumonia and that I was hospitalized in 2009 with bacterial pneumonia.
As a result (but I think I'd be this way even without my medical history), I'm cautious about exposing myself to the Covid virus, not wanting the virus to get in my system and go after my respiratory system or my weakened kidneys.
With the recent surge of Covid activity, I've been very selective about where I'm willing to go outside the home.
So, when Stu and Byrdman went to work to arrange a get together for them, Lars, Craig Burkhart, and me, I was grateful that the plan was to go to the Republic Kitchen + Taphouse in Post Falls and take advantage of their roomy outdoor patio seating.
I was fired up to get together with these guys -- we were all Kellogg Wildcat basketball players (well, I wore a uniform), played a ton of ball together at the YMCA, played baseball in Kellogg, and have a lot of shared history beyond sports.
I was also fired up because I was pretty sure that Republic Kitchen + Taphouse was serving a kellerbeir on tap, one of my favorite styles. It comes from Silver City Brewing in Bremerton, WA.
I love its name: Ziggy Zoggy Party Beer.
When the Troxstar and I met up with Emily Sauter at Notch Brewing in Salem, MA back in June, Em gave me a pint can of kellerbier from Fox Farms Brewery where she is employed.
I will be eternally grateful to Em for introducing me to this beer.
I was especially grateful today. Ziggy Zoggy Party Beer was, given my taste, perfect. Republic served it ice cold, a necessity for lagers, and it was light, crisp, and, I thought, had a nice hint of lemon.
If Ziggy Zoggy were available at Yoke's, I'd be all over it!
2. Even more awesome than the beer, our food, and our attentive server (who played Pink Floyd on the patio music system just for us!), was yakkin' with Lars, Stu, Byrdman, and Fred (aka Craig).
Our conversation got me thinking about the seismic change in my life that occurred when I was so seriously injured at the Zinc Plant in July of 1973.
By being injured and then moving away, I missed out on playing slow pitch softball and men's league basketball in the Silver Valley and in CdA.
Lars, Stu, Freddy, and Byrdman all played and for years now I've vicariously joined them in the different leagues by listening to the awesome stories, many of them on the field of play, and many others at post-game watering holes like the Kopper Keg, Johnny's Bar and the Back Door Tavern.
Telling stories about these softball and basketball exploits always brings up the names of great high school athletes who played in North Idaho 50-60 years ago, so it's fun to recall great players from Lewiston, Moscow, Sandpoint, Post Falls, Sandpoint, Bonners Ferry, Wallace, Mullan, Plummer, Coeur d'Alene, and elsewhere.
I'm happy with the way my life turned out.
Nonetheless, I feel some pangs of -- hmmm -- what is it? it's not regret -- is there a word for feeling nostalgia for something I never did? You know how you feel when you miss some one who you used to spend a lot of time with? Or how you miss a place where you used to live? Well, I have some of those same feelings for men's slow pitch softball and men's league basketball in North Idaho, even though my slow pitch "career" was only two months (cut short by the accident) and I never played men's league basketball. I feel like I want to do something once again that I never did in the first place.
Go figure!
3. I could have stayed at our table listening to Pink Floyd, soaking up stories, and drinking Ziggy Zoggy Party Beer all afternoon, but, alas, our get together ended.
I returned to Kellogg and did a little bit of clicking around on the World Wide Web.
First of all, Byrdman and Stu included me in a follow up discussion they had online about high school basketball in the Spokane area when we were in high school.
Next, I followed up on some news Freddy shared with us that I didn't know about.
His daughter, Jacki Burkhart, is a dental hygienist in Oregon and studies and plays high stakes poker on the side.
She entered and won a poker players' essay contest in 2018. The prize was entry into the PokerStars Player Championship where she finished in 38th place and won $86,400. You can read about her success in this interview with her, here.
The interview is good, but, in my opinion, what you really want to do is read her winning essay. She writes beautifully about how she learned to play cards which leads to her telling the story of discovering that her mother was (and is) afflicted with Alzheimer's disease.
If you'd like to read her essay, it's here.
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