It’s early Friday evening and Burke and I are at a local watering hole irritating all of our neighbors.

“My turn,” I shriek.

“OK.”

“Meow meow meow meow meow-meow-meow-meow-meow. Meow-meow. Meow meow meow meow meow-meow-meow-meow-meow-meow!”

“Billy Joel’s For the Longest Time!”

“Meow!”

We celebrate.

“Meow-meow-meow-meow.”

“Beethoven’s 9th Symphony?!”

“Meow!”

We celebrate further.

At 51 years old, I figured that discovering new talents was behind me. I have long resigned myself to the fact that I’ll probably never find a till-now-unknown skill for dunking a basketball or archery or high dive fluency. But that all changes on Friday, July 24 2026 at around 5ish. I hummed a few lines of CCR’s Proud Mary in all meows and my life was changed in an instant. Burke made me do a few more songs (Radiohead’s Karma Police, The Star Spangled Banner, Happy Birthday (Stevie Wonder), and Gin and Juice).

There was no doubt: I am a genius.

Well, that just started things from there. I started meowing everything. Burke tried too – the kid’s okay, but she’s no vocal meow prodigy like this guy. To be fair, she’s been working at it these last few days and she’s coming around. She did a halfway decent version of Gangsta’s Paradise yesterday. A bit pitchy, but she’s coming along.

But I have to say: I am the one to watch. I have recorded meow song messages for several members of my family on Facebook Messenger. Despite their insistence that I ‘stop immediately’ for the ‘sake of the family’ or they will ‘contact the authorities’, I think they’re dazzled.

All of the other talents I have discovered within myself later in life can’t make me any money. Though I am particularly fond of my newfound ability to spend the exact amount on a gift card, the sad truth is nobody is going to pay me to do that. Well, unless it’s my birthday.

I want all of you fiftysomethings and sixtysomethings out there who think that your time for talent discovery has passed – it hasn’t. All you have to do is put away your phone and find yourself with nothing to do. Then put yourself into an arena for discovery. This could be anything or anyplace: a local Little League field, a tree in your yard, your bathroom.    

Next, just let yourself loose and see what happens. You never know what you’ll learn about yourself. You might be able to whistle tunes backwards or identify a bird, or write the world’s most perfect S. You never know. The world is your oyster – which you may find a talent for shucking like a madman.   

If you need more than me as an example, remember that Grandma Moses didn’t start painting until her late 70s and Harland Sanders didn’t conceive of KFC until his mid-60s. And imagine if they hadn’t? Tragedy.  

Holidays have changed a great deal since I was a young person. Oh, I don’t mean that in a get-off-my-lawn way. Sure, there are more sweatpants than when I was young, but that’s not it. I mean in how I view holidays.

When I was a kid, there had to be activities and those activities had to be at a beach or in an amusement park. The more large deranged mice the better. As I got older, it was all about seeing old things: churches, cemeteries, monuments, towers both Eifel and Leaning. I liked to travel for at least 2 or 3 weeks – anything less was downright disappointing. But I was poor, so I had to eat bread and drink in parks. The large deranged mice were mostly sequestered to my accommodation.

Nowadays, I revel in a slowed-down week. A week away from my busy life. I live someone else’s life for a week – we rent a flat, fill the fridge, do the dishes, and just take in a town. It’s the best kind of travel for this old man.  

Last year we rented a place on a backstreet near Genoa’s port. We walked along the ocean, and sat in shady town squares up the side of mountains, sipping waters and eating bakery-pizzas. We meandered its lovely medieval alleyways. We got lost in those, bouncing from trattoria and trattoria to café and café until we somehow managed to waddle back to the flat.

This year, we went to Mikulov – Moravian wine country. We rented a flat in sight of the castle, filled the fridge, did the dishes, and lounged in its living room. It was great. Not, however, for our dog.

One of the highlights of travelling within our home country was that we could bring the dog. This seemed great. We expounded several times on how excited our dog would be to get to stay with us rather than be put up in her little doggy hotel with fields and lots of other dogs and (based on the pictures they send us) at which she usually has more fun than us.

We were wrong.

When deciding on where to go on holiday this year, we thought we might avoid planes. You see, the antics of Captain Crapshispants has made travelling in the air a bit more unreliable. We didn’t relish sitting on a tarmac. No, we thought we might stay on the ground and get around somewhere by train. This led us to the eastern part of the Czech Republic: southern Moravia.

Southern Moravia is known for its white wine, hearty food, chateaus, and for cyclists – seriously, they’re like ants at a picnic. Basically, southern Moravia is like the Czech Republic’s Italy for people who don’t want to leave the country. Since a good chunk of the local tourist draw is wine, we decide to do a private wine tour on the first day we’re there. This is because the most I know about wine is that if you buy the twisty guys you won’t end up with cork in your drink.    

Anna picks us up at 11 am. She has an easy smile and a calm demeanor. This might be because she’s built like a professional volleyball player and can just throw us all into a vineyard if we cause any trouble. Anna tells us the deal: a vineyard, a winery, another vineyard, and then a cellar.

We pull into a vineyard outside of Mikulov. We get to drinking fast, a decision of which I approve immensely. The landscape is a mix of plush and arid. It’s spaces of baked earth next to vast vineyards and rows of grapevines, all under limestone cliffs. One might expect Don Corleone to meander by in a white shirt and a vest and a terrifying look in his eyes. But that doesn’t happen.

What does happen is the beginning of our wine education. Anna tells us what we’ve looking at and what it adds to the local wine. (Limestone regulates water, minerality, acidity, and also looks really cool.) She explains that the heat – while pounding down on us – actually helps the wine quite a bit. I soon feel the heady rush of learning . . . though there’s a chance it’s the four glasses of wine we’ve had since stopping nine minutes before.  

The dog? Well, the dog is like me. (Yes, she’s short-legged, white, pug-nosed, and hairy, but that’s not what I mean.) She too likes basking in the sun . . . for a few seconds before realizing that she hates heat and the sun and sweating and instead wishes she was in that Twilight Zone where the Earth has snapped off its axes and is flying away from the sun. On the other hand, there’s all this dirt to roll around in. She does that for a while.

It’s at our third stop – another vineyard, after a winery – that the now significant volumes of wine coursing through my veins begins to have an effect on me. This time, the dog and I ask permission to go off and look at the grapevines. We are granted such access. A diminutive wine glass dangles from my fingers, a crisp Welsh Reisling sloshing around in it. The dog’s overwhelmed by the new scents and all the new pokey things that can jab her in the eye and cost me a few thousand Koruna. She approaches a grapevine and then honors it, evidently, by flopping onto her back and rolling around in its subservient soil.

Today is the Fourth of July and America’s 250^th birthday. And a lot of us are just not feeling it. Oh, I get it. America is divided, we are torn and entrenched, and peanut butter is too expensive. Worse still, this division is seemingly encouraged and proliferated by Jabba the President sitting in the Oval Office. Not since Jack McCloskey chucked me a bang snap at the block party watermelon table in 1986 have I shed so many tears on a July 4^th.

But if there is a July 4 holiday lesson, it’s perseverance. America has faced tough times before and has fought through. Sure, we did so through rebellion, tenacity, and will. But we also did so through debate, discussion of ideas, communication, and working together. And that’s why today’s hammered history looks at the unsung hero of the American Revolution – taverns.

There’s no way to overestimate the importance of taverns in colonial America. First, you went there to drink your weight in rum. But they also served as post offices, courts, hotels, political meeting places, and local newspapers. Taverns in America served a similar purpose to that of coffee houses in London. They were petri dishes of society, throwing together a mix of people, opinions, and probably body odors. Since everyone shared tables, unlikely neighbors rubbed elbows. Literate drinkers read the news to illiterate table mates. It was a place to drink and talk.

It’s not hard to see a dark parallel to today. We no longer sit face to face and talk. We chat with people from behind keyboards and at the first whiff of disagreement we resort to sending complete strangers seething epithets whose lacking wit is made up for with CURSES IN ALL-CAPS. Dialogue has become a thing as mythic as Santa Claus, the Jersey Devil, or a republican politician with a spinal column. In our separate places, we are being pitted against one another by those in charge – whose greatest fear is open discussion amongst us who disagree. What we need is to talk. What we need is a drink face to face with someone we may not agree with.

What we the people need is a tavern.

In colonial America, it was not hard to find one. You could throw a rock backwards and hit a tavern door. Or, more likely, knock the tricorn hat off a drunk guy standing in a tavern doorway. In 1776 Philadelphia alone there were more than 120 taverns, inns, and ordinaries. Considering there were between 30,000–40,000 people living in the city, this makes about one place of drinking for every 250–300 Philadelphians. Because we the people apparently believed that democracy worked best within spitting distance of a tavern.