He sat at the bar, first stool from the left, just like he's done for fifty-some years. His old man owned the place up until his death at sixty-seven from a bad stroke. He can still remember the exact spot he fell to the floor, and every time he goes behind the bar, he steps over nothing but sees his old man lying there plain as day. He had left the joint to his wife, who ran things the best she could but hated every minute, so he took the place over, and the decades that followed became a place of a thousand stories, each its own best seller and fuel for his own writing that one day would be published, or so he could only imagine.
There was a table in a corner where all the goings on could be seen, a perfect place to watch and listen as another story was told. The four men at that table came in every day unless one got sick or had to go out of town for one reason or another. They grew older together, at that table, a part of each other's lives, if you could call it a life. They all had notebooks where they'd write down a particularly good story, thinking one day they'd have enough material to put together a book. They even named their possible book The Tales of Four Drunks.
Life does go full circle; that was evident with a younger crowd coming in to have some drinks in the dimly lit old place, where craftsmanship could be seen everywhere you looked, and the chance to see the old timers sitting where they always sat before one died and then another until only two chairs were left. The once somewhat quiet bar now catered to the younger crowd, not because they were wanted there, but because their money was a good enough reason to put up with the noise that drowned out the old jukebox playing songs their grandparents listened to. Taking a break, he would sit at the corner table with his two lifelong friends, trying to hear a story, but there were no stories, just noise and power drinking that often found two banty roosters pretending they could fight, which ended when he intervened and broke it up.
Then one day, he hung a closed sign on the old bar for reasons of his own. He had had enough noise, rudeness, and disrespect that repeated itself daily. He spent the next few weeks restoring the bar to its original state while adding several tables. There were a few bottles of his best booze and a keg of beer poured with the same tap his dad and he used. But the biggest change was the availability of desktop computers for anyone to use to write their stories. Little did he know at the time that he had opened a place where old-timers, along with some younger writers, began telling life stories and memories that spanned almost a hundred years. The click of fingers on keys replaced the old jukebox, but it remained where it had always been, only silent and unplugged.
The place was renamed to A Place to Write. And writers came from everywhere to capture the look and smells of a dimly lit bar transformed into a place where every table was full, as was the bartop, where, not long ago, mugs of beer were slid across to a waiting customer. He did write his book, and it sold a million copies. The title, Tabletops to laptops with respect.
Life does go full circle; that was evident with a younger crowd coming in to have some drinks in the dimly lit old place, where craftsmanship could be seen everywhere you looked, and the chance to see the old timers sitting where they always sat before one died and then another until only two chairs were left. The once somewhat quiet bar now catered to the younger crowd, not because they were wanted there, but because their money was a good enough reason to put up with the noise that drowned out the old jukebox playing songs their grandparents listened to. Taking a break, he would sit at the corner table with his two lifelong friends, trying to hear a story, but there were no stories, just noise and power drinking that often found two banty roosters pretending they could fight, which ended when he intervened and broke it up.
Then one day, he hung a closed sign on the old bar for reasons of his own. He had had enough noise, rudeness, and disrespect that repeated itself daily. He spent the next few weeks restoring the bar to its original state while adding several tables. There were a few bottles of his best booze and a keg of beer poured with the same tap his dad and he used. But the biggest change was the availability of desktop computers for anyone to use to write their stories. Little did he know at the time that he had opened a place where old-timers, along with some younger writers, began telling life stories and memories that spanned almost a hundred years. The click of fingers on keys replaced the old jukebox, but it remained where it had always been, only silent and unplugged.
The place was renamed to A Place to Write. And writers came from everywhere to capture the look and smells of a dimly lit bar transformed into a place where every table was full, as was the bartop, where, not long ago, mugs of beer were slid across to a waiting customer. He did write his book, and it sold a million copies. The title, Tabletops to laptops with respect.
Mike 2026
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