Stories from childhood.

Back when I was a child, there was a large beer joint (that was the terminology for it then, at least around where I lived) just outside of town called Sabre’s. It was a big old square building surrounded by a dirt and gravel parking lot. It was closed down and gone before I was ever old enough to go inside, but I used to hear stories about it, mainly from my parents. It held this slightly magical spot in my consciousness for a long time, like an old favorite book that your Mother or Father would read to you at night when you were small. Not an important memory, or one that I visited often—but it was there, nonetheless.
My Dad, in his younger days, used to enjoy drinking beer and running around with friends. When us kids were small, though, he quit all that and started going to church with Mom and all of us regularly. Well, at least as regularly as he could, seeing as how he worked swing-shift: a week of days, a week of evenings, and a week of midnights, and then a long weekend off. Anyway, apparently he and Mom, and sometimes just him by himself, used to go there for square-dancing on the weekends. I could never picture them doing this, for some reason. Not as weird as trying to picture your parents having sex, but something along the same lines. I just couldn’t see it.
My Dad was thin when he was young, and short, with glasses, but reasonably attractive, I suppose. At least no major uglifying defects. But somehow, he was always popular with women. I think it had to do with his knowing how to talk to them and to actually listen. He had four sisters, after all, so he should know how to talk to women. Anyway, whatever it was, I had the feeling that Mom wasn’t always with him there. I know she didn’t like to drink. The old story I heard was that she only ever got drunk once, back before us kids came along. She was with Dad at some friends’ house who lived outside of town. They had walked there (back in those days, they walked almost everywhere) and spent the evening drinking and playing cards. When they left to come back, they had to cross a barbed-wire fence, and Mom got tangled up in it and cut herself up pretty good. She never got drunk again. On special occasions she would have a glass of wine with dinner, but that was it.
Anyway, Sabre’s sounded like a fun place, because they always mentioned those square dances with a fondness in the voice, like those were the good old days. But the thing that really placed Sabre’s in my memory was them telling me that the gypsies used to camp there whenever they came through. Gypsies! In my hometown! How incredibly exotic! I couldn’t imagine it actually happening, though I had a clear enough picture in my mind of the colorful wagons with dark-eyed women inside telling fortunes, the black-haired men outside smoking and sharpening their knives around the fire, the kids running around laughing and playing. How I wish I could have been there to see it!
The sad thing is that of course, if I had been there to see it, it probably would have just been disappointing. Probably by then they weren’t using horses, just dirty old trucks and trailers. Dirt and poverty. The usual sad story. But those were not the images I had when I was young. Now it’s too late to talk to Mom or Dad either one about it, and to find out the actual details. But maybe it’s better left as a romantic, colorful, exotic image, that I can return to with a deep nostalgia for something I never actually knew.