You haven’t seen me for a while because I’ve been recuperating from utter rejection at my parents’ house, out on the now über-hip Long Island, home of the Field Day Fest. Whilst on LI, I had the fortune of attending a ceremony celebrating my Mother’s induction into the adult honor society at her college. Adult honor society indeed — it’s no small feat keeping a 4.0 while simultaneously working full-time at a job that dulls your senses, keeping tabs on your nearly-grown children and errant husband, and all the while attempting to have a life of your own. Yet she does it. Unfortunately, the ceremony didn’t live up to the hype, though it did come through with plenty of fodder to allow me and my two younger brothers to revert to our old wisecracking selves. As the inductees were presented with their awards, we were presented with such delights as: a family of blonds with two small male children who both sported short-long hairstyles which included tails that nearly skimmed the ground; a Rastputin-like adjunct professor with dyed black facial hair that would rival that of a lifelong mountain man; the sharp twang of several Long Island-accented speeches from the mouths of several Botoxed faces; an absurdly charicatured photographer, complete with darting, squirrely movements, plaid shirt and one tiny hoop earring; and watching as each the inductees was told, over and over, to schootch forward to have her picture taken with her new, framable certificate, as my father pointed out in a bellowing stage whisper, “Gee, for a bunch of smart people, they sure don’t catch on too quick.” Following the ceremony, we all went back to the house to demolish a few liters of Pinot Grigio, as per standard family routine. After the last of the wine had been poured, I began rooting around the fridge for some beer that I was sure my brother or father would have stashed in there.

“Nothing left, huh?” I called out, my head halfway into the refrigerator. We were all — me, my mother, her sister, my father and the elder of the two brothers, Billy — stationed in the newly remodeled but still small kitchen.

My dad replied in the negative, as he’d topped off all of our glasses with the last dribble of wine a few minutes before. The wine was gone. As if in a three-second delay from another time zone, my mother suddenly realized the gravity of the situation.

“No wine!?” she cried, stomping her foot. “But I wanted more wine!” She sank back against her new countertop and decided instead to retire.

I decided instead to drink a bit of water, and when that failed and the adults finally pushed off to bed, my brother and I walked over to the Dairy Barn for a 12-pack of Heineken.

The woman at the Dairy Barn, obviously under the influence of some illegal substance, wrinkled her nose at Bill’s Florida state ID. I thrust my driver’s license in her direction. “We’re siblings,” I explained, as if that mattered in determining whether or not to sell us more beer than we really needed at that point. She took my brother’s money and sent us on our way.

During the two block walk home I realized that I had never walked up to the window at Dairy Barn before. Dairy Barn, the colossus of Long Island drive-thru convenience, was until then a totally vehicular experience. And so I had finally come into my own as a pedestrian, there at the Dairy Barn with 144 ounces of beer under my arm.