“Well,” his father said, “reckon I’ll hoist me a couple.”
They turned through the swinging doors into a blast of odor and sound. There was no music: only the density of bodies and of the smell of a market bar, of beer, whiskey and country bodies, salt and leather; no clamor, only the thick quietude of crumpled talk. Rufus stood looking at the light on a damp spittoon and he heard his father ask for whiskey, and knew he was looking up and down the bar for men he might know. But they seldom came from so far away as the Powell River Valley; and Rufus soon realized that his father had found, tonight, no one he knew. He looked up his father’s length and watched him bend backwards tossing one off in one jolt in a lordly manner, and a moment later heard him say to the man next him, “That’s my boy”; and felt a warmth of love. Next moment he felt his father’s hands under his armpits, and he was lifted, high, and seated on the bar, looking into a long row of huge bristling and bearded red faces. The eyes of the men nearest him were interested, and kind; some of them smiled; further away, the eyes were impersonal and questioning, but now even some of these began to smile. Somewhat timidly, but feeling assured that his father was proud of him and that he was liked, and liked these men, he smiled back; and suddenly many of the men laughed. He was disconcerted by their laughter and lost his smile a moment; then, realizing it was friendly, smiled again; and again they laughed. His father smiled at him. “That’s my boy,” he said warmly. “Six years old, and he can already read like I couldn’t read when I was twice his age.”
Rufus felt a sudden hollowness in his voice, and all along the bar, and in his own heart. But how does he fight, he thought. You don’t brag about smartness if your son is brave. He felt the anguish of shame, but his father did not seem to notice, except that as suddenly as he had lifted him up to the bar, he gently lifted him down again. “Reckon I’ll have another,” he said, and drank it more slowly; then, with a few good nights, they went out.
— James Agee, A Death in the Family
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I sent the following email to my brothers and my sister this afternoon:
to my siblings
I am in a favorite bar near Carnegie Hall. The waitresses are so nice to me.
A guy just walked in with a little kid under five. They are sitting in a booth right next to me.
It triggered a memory which made me feel very sentimental. I have not thought about it for years.
I wound up at a bar with Dad, probably in Cambridge, when I was around six or seven.
I sat on a barstool. Everyone — the bartender and everyone else — was so nice to me. They treated me like an honored guest.
The bartender gave me a bowl of potato chips …. how I enjoyed them!
I was bathed in warmth and kindness.
miss Dad terribly
ROGER
— posted by Roger W. Smith
July 31, 2021

Walden Pond, Concord, Mass., early 50’s. My father, me, and my two brothers. I am the furthest to the left.