Category: Sunday Story

The Last Time

When someone shows you who they are – believe them the first time – Maya Angelou

Yesterday I wrote a deadly serious essay about the Republican Party, using Maya Angelou’s famous quote.  Today I find that quote applies again – but this is anything but deadly serious.  This is a Monday version of the “Sunday Story”.

Milk

So I’m lactose intolerant.  That sounds like such a “yuppie” condition – “Oh, I can’t have that, I’m lactose intolerant,” as I turn away in my Izod shirt from the ice cream stand at the country club.  But it is a real thing , a problem that I deny only at my peril.  Well, maybe peril is too strong a word, at my “discomfort” is probably a more realistic term.

And I loved milk.  I grew up in a three-glasses of milk a day home.  And it wasn’t that 2% “blue” milk – it was full scale milk-milk.  Milk was perfect with cookies, with dinner, in cereal (with as much sugar as I could get away with).  But even better:  a glass of milk with not-quite-done hot brownies with a spoon out of the oven.  Oh man – that was the “bomb”, worth getting yelled at for taking the brownies out too soon, worth even learning how to make my own so I could have the whole pan to myself.  

When I got older, milk played an important part in my travels across the country.  It might sound odd today, but give me a bag of pretzel rods and a quart of chocolate milk, and I was good for five hundred miles.  I drove from Colorado to Maine, dozens of trips from Ohio to Washington, DC; and to every near and far mountain trail I could find.  And it was always with chocolate milk and pretzels, chomping my way down the interstate with a milk moustache.

Refrigeration

When I got to college, one of the early problems my roommate Charlie and I had to solve was how to keep milk in our room.  There weren’t “community” refrigerators in the dorm (nothing would stay in there anyway), but we found we could rent a small one for $40 a year.  When I went to Denison, I wasn’t a coffee drinker.  I grew up in a British home, and Mom taught me to love tea with milk and sugar.  When I found I needed the caffeine to fuel my college lifestyle, I needed tea, and nothing was worse than “black” tea.  So we got a refrigerator.  

It didn’t work out quite as well as we hoped, and I ended up shifting to coffee.  Since I had no pre-conceptions about it, I just drank my coffee black.  No need to refrigerate anything – and no need for trips “down-the-hill” to get milk and sugar.  At the time, it was just a hot-pot and some Folger’s instant (yuck!!!).  And the refrigerator got filled with other things anyway by the middle of the semester, six-packs of beer with the red warning label – “No Greater than 3.2% Alcohol by content” on the top. 

Discovery

When I first started teaching here in Pataskala, Ohio, it was still a small (almost) rural town.  I was living in an apartment, and my mentor Coach and friend John McGowan, often invited me to his house for Sunday dinner. His wife Mary Grace was an amazing cook, and it was real family-time with John, Mary Grace and their three young kids around the table.  

I loved those dinners.  And I always had a couple glasses of milk, along with the kids.  But, all of a sudden, I began to feel queasy after I came back to the apartment.  It only happened on Sunday nights, and it took a bit to figure out what I was eating that was making me feel bad.  So one night, I switched to water instead of milk, and I made the discovery.  For some reason, unknown to me, I was now lactose intolerant.

The Can’t List

I can do a whole “Bubba Gump” list of the things I can’t eat now.  No ice cream, not even the machine ice cream from Dairy Queen. No milkshakes (or chocolate mint sodas from Greater’s in Cincinnati – my ultimate favorite).  And no cream or milk in my tea – that much will set me off.  And no Cheerio’s with four teaspoons of sugar. I can still eat pizza (whew) and other cheeses, but really rich sauces and soups like lobster bisque or even clam chowder, are out.  And what happens if I “forget”?  Well, my stomach hurts, I’m impossible to be around, and my throat fills up.  I’m not going to “die”, but for the next fifteen hours or so I’m not a happy guy.

So why am I telling you this?  So yesterday afternoon Jenn and I did some snow removal work, and decided to have a beer on the way home.  We stopped at a local restaurant, Elliot’s, and sat at the bar.  It was a cold day, and I decided to have a “stout” beer.  On tap they had a fancy brand, “Milk Stout” from a brewery in Longmont, Colorado called “Left Hand”.  So I had a couple pints of the thick, black, coffee-like beer.

The First Time

Now I thought the “milk” of “Milk Stout” was the thick texture.  But when I got home, all of a sudden, I felt queasy.  Then I started coughing, and spent the rest in the evening in some discomfort.  About midnight, I finally checked out the “Red Hand” site, and found that “Milk Stout” had “just a hint” of lactose.  The brewery promises that it is much less than a glass of milk, and that even the lactose intolerant should be fine – but not so much for me.

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time”.  That applies to beer as well. Milk Stout is – as far as my “fragile” system is concerned – more milk than stout. As Jenn said – “It did say milk on the handle”.   I should have believed them the first time.

The Sunday Story Series