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Dreams of a Dad

March 6, 2017 · by Oliver Gray

I startle awake to the sound of a grunt and a meek cry. I drape my arm over the side of the bed to look at the time on my phone, hoping to block as much light as possible from the display. My head aches.

2:13 AM

Lately, I dream of my dad. He’s particularly annoyed with the car parts I’ve bought. Not a single night passes where he isn’t scolding or explaining; imparting, in his own way, how he would have done it, which is invariably not the way I did, in fact, do it.

While the dreams play out in a vividness as potent as waking reality, he almost never speaks. All our communication is nonverbal; grimaces, smiles, shrugs, winks. He’ll often walk some distance in front of me, leading, but rarely looking back.

But last night, he spoke. As he passed an hunk of metal under a spinning wire brush, cutting through 50 years of road grime, he said, “I bet you don’t even know what this is.”

He held it down to my face, so I could inspect it. I realized I was a kid again, standing behind the master as his ever-learning apprentice. The old dirt had given way to brilliant silvery surface below. Pretty, but pocked with years of neglect.

“It’s a brake caliper,” I said.

He smiled. An acknowledgement. I handed it back, so he could return it to its original luster. In that moment, I was as tall as him.

I wake again, this time to a more perturbed sigh and snort. I play the bed-phone-light game again, but this time accidentally flood the room with blue light. The bassinet next to me shifts and fidgets with the hungry wiggles of a newborn.

3:36 AM

Her mom is busy studying her role as Sisyphus, rock replaced by breast and pump. I go downstairs to grab a bottle. The cats barely stir as the fridge turns kitchen night into kitchen day.

In the dreams, we also rarely touch. He wasn’t one for hugs or physical affection in life, either, so perhaps it makes sense. If we do connect, it’s through some medium; my hand on a ratchet as I place it into his waiting, open palm.

But last night, he touched my shoulder. Standing behind me, in a flip of usual place, he reassured me as I torqued down the bolts on a cylinder head. A summer breeze swept through the garage. For the first time in a long time, the tone was not one of lecture, but one of acceptance.

She sucks greedily from the fake nipple. Her little blue eyes flash at me in the dim light, so bright, so wonderful, so overflowing with curiosity. I take the bottle away for a burp, and she screams, but then settles.

Normally, she doesn’t speak, but this morning, she coos and goos a chorus of baby questions.

Normally, she doesn’t touch me, but this morning, her tiny little hands wrap my fingers with a vice grip.

She may never meet her grandpa here, but part of me knows she’s already met him there.

She snuggles into my shoulder a little, drunk on milk and midnight dark.

Forgotten Friday: The Ghost in the Machine

November 21, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

Clutch in, shift up. Clutch out, accelerator down. Knuckles white on black leather, beats keeping pace with revs. A tiger growls under metal cover, and gravity asserts its dominance.

Despite our advances in robotics and AI, I’ll always argue that a car is the closet we have come to creating life. Loyal, dependable, but reliant on our attention and love, a car is a mechanized pet, an ever present comforting companion. I know not all people are “car people” but everyone who has ever really driven, felt their synapses fire along with every zing of the spark plugs, knows the power and freedom that comes from piloting what is in essence, a controlled explosion bolted to four pieces of rubber.

My Friday nights in high school weren’t typical; when others were roaring rallies at football games or bases-deep mid-movie make-out, I drove. Down narrow back roads lining the Potomac, too fast, too hard, eking every inch out of every corner, leaving my mark in streaks of black and rubbery squeals through quiet Maryland nights. Never did I feel as alive, as invincible, as physically vulnerable and on the edge of everything, than when I dropped into second and swung hard around a hairpin somewhere off of River Road.

I grew up with tales of street races, of my dad tearing through Knutsford and Sale in his Triumph Dolomite Sprint, of him jumping a bridge near his house and throwing a con-rod through the side of the engine he tuned and babied for months and months. The stories, sweet and sour, seemed like memories of loves lost; partly excitement at pushing the car and himself to their literal limits, partly melancholy remembrance of those who came and went before their time. It was hard to say where the line cut through my dad’s adoration. To him they were maintained machines; tools, steel, and oil. But they were also lubricated lust; romantic, beautiful, mobile art. A car was not conveyance. It was confidence and conviviality, courage and companionship.

He taught me everything I know about vehicles, showed me that nuts and bolts were bones and joints, pistons were heart valves, that exhaust was a voice and headlights eyes. He taught me the mechanical specifics – the how and why of car repair – but indirectly instilled in me a sense of awe in understanding (and as a result control over) a force much bigger and stronger than myself. I love cars because my dad loved them. I drive because my dad drove. Our genes are a gearbox.

I drove my previous car for ten years and one hundred and twenty three thousand miles. My dad helped me put the down payment on the ’04 Mini Cooper S, smiling proudly while also giving me the obligatory parental, “your payments better be on time” look. He’d been pleased that I’d taken to Minis; he’d rebuilt and driven two in 1970s England, a Mini Clubman, and a Mini van. It was officially my car, but my dad spoke to it too, and whenever he took that driver’s seat from me, I could feel it bowing to his authority, like a wild horse to a worthy rider.

I eventually had to sell it, though. Cars, much like people, don’t always age gracefully, and by the time my friend was pushing eleven, arthritis had claimed him suspension, and his skin, despite years of anti-aging treatments, betrayed the cracks and wrinkles of old age. I didn’t cry, but my chest definitely tightened as I signed his body away to the Carmax funeral home. I knew I couldn’t afford to keep him forever, but as I stood in that little office, reviewing my title, I had a momentary notion to run, slide into the seat, drive until neither of us had anything left. I wrapped my arms around the black and glass as best I could before the staff drove him back behind the building, frozen, for a second, by the idea that I had just given up this piece of my life that had been a constant for a decade.

It wasn’t the car itself. Sure, I loved the black and chrome, and the comfort of knowing every inch of the car perfectly, intimately. But that’s not what swirled the acid in my stomach, not what forced that tell-tale surge of regret.

It was the memories.

Taking my future wife to lunch the first day we met. My dad riding shotgun as we cruised to the beach. Nights of DC rush hour, weekends on open endless roads. Pushing 90 MPH in tears, the day I got the call. The hours and hours and miles and miles that separated 18 year old me from 28 year old me. The life in the clutch, in the shifter, in the leather seats, and rear view mirrors. The ghost of my passing life living in that machine.

I worried that I’d lose all that, the what that made my who.

But the ghost lives on, moved from one machine to the next. In the decadence of the new car smell I can feel the old car’s spirit; in the few hundred miles feel a hundred thousand memories. When I connect to the new car, I can feel my dad’s arm through mine on the wheel, see my wife in the seat next to me, revel in everything he taught me manifesting anew, for a whole new set of adventures fueled by those I left behind.

Clutch in, shift up. Clutch out, accelerator down. Knuckles white on black leather, beats keeping pace with revs. A ghost haunts the steel frame, and memory asserts its dominance.

Forgotten Friday: My Sherry Amour

January 24, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

There are few things that simultaneously sting and soothe as much as sorting through the assorted material detritus of someone’s life. All the papers, the scribbles, the notes left hanging in the pulpy ether, inken echoes of a person’s voice on every leaf. Even the things that don’t bare their literal mark carry grainy nostalgic gravitas, reminders of how that person drove down the highways of time, what prosaic hour-fillers caused a traffic jam of commitment and desire in those relatively few moments we’re blessed with consciousness.

I was helping my mom with some simple jobs at her house, changing a light bulb here, replacing a battery there, organizing her transition into fiduciary executorship even farther over there. After I’d gotten the smoke detectors to screech their new battery announcement through the whole house, she asked if I’d take a look at a box in the garage. A box filled with wine.

I expected to find some store-bought merlots and cabernets, maybe some of the proverbial “good stuff” that my dad had hoarded away as an apocalyptic just-in-case. She pointed me to the decaying ruins of a red and white cardboard cube with eight emerald bottles sticking out like prairie dogs viewing the plain from the safety of their holey home. The bottles looked familiar, but distant, that friend from elementary school whose face changed just enough from the evolution out of childhood and into adulthood that you only recognize them after a few minutes of guarded, remote study. I knew these bottles at one time, maybe even filled them and corked them, but couldn’t triangulate when, or why, or how.

They were unlabeled (the hallmark of Gray family breweries), covered in silky webs and solid dust, and gave no hint of their contents. My dad had been as eccentric in his brewing as he had in the rest of his life: there was equal chance this was carrot wine, rhubarb wine, banana wine, or possibly even sour apple.

The only way to find out was to pierce the cork with silver spiral.

As the soft cylinder popped out, I was hit with oakey, odd aromas. Out of the bottle it was brandy-brown, liquefied caramel, chicken gravy made from homemade stock. Syrupy legs slipped their glassy nylons, slithering seductive and sexy. This was no normal wine. Suddenly, as woody wonder hit my tongue, I remembered.

When my parents moved out of and sold my childhood home, my dad had found a carboy deep in the under-stair recesses of the basement. The airlock was Sahara dry, and we assumed the six or so gallons was lost to oxidation and history. He had no idea what it was, or why he’d forgotten about it, so before we poured it out on Dionysus’s grave, we sampled it. Turns out he’d made sherry. Possibly accidentally. Accidental sherry that had aged for five plus years in quiet, unmolested darkness.

I helped him bottle it, and just like he had, let its existence slip the fetters of my memory. By the time I found it, it had lived another five peaceful years, watching, waiting.

To sip a ten year old sherry, made by your father’s hand, is to reconnect to the way he spent his time. It’s his last vintage, the final fading fermentation of a life that reached full attenuation months ago. And now it’s all mine, salvaged from a dusty garage, plucked from my memory, planted in front of me to raise in cheers of life gone and life yet to live.

My dad's ten year old sherry in my grandma's (his mom's) hundred year old decanter.

My dad’s decade old sherry in my grandma’s (his mom’s) century old decanter.

How to Brew a Boddingtons Clone

August 26, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

When looking for a new recipe, the adventurous homebrewer is faced with a breadth of choices so vast that it can be debilitating.

You can, without too much exaggeration, brew almost anything you can think of. Want something spicy? Try a Jalapeño/Haberno recipe. Feeling a bit light, perhaps craving some fruit in your malt? Try a watermelon wheat, or a strawberry blonde, or blueberry lager. You can even start messing with the types of sugars or yeasts you base the beer on and journey deep into the weird world of sweet potato, pizza, creme brulee, or even beard (yes face-hair) beer.

With so many options, so much potential just waiting to be mashed and fermented, it seems wrong to brew a clone of an existing beer, to recreate what has already been created, to add nothing new and plagiarize the work of another brewer so brazenly.

But, despite being the safe and boring choice, cloning is one of the best things you can do to improve your homebrewing skills. We know why we like certain commercial beer, be it the flavor or smell or presentation (or a little from columns A, B, and C), so by attempting to brew a clone, we can see how exactly the brewers used their alchemical skills to bring about such a well done beer. It gives us a standard to measure our own brew, and ultimately brewing skill, against.

How to Brew a Boddingtons Clone

I won’t try to hide why I picked Boddingtons of all the beers out there; it was, and will always be, my dad’s favorite beer. As my Untappd profile says, I’m pretty sure I drank Boddingtons before milk. I understand it may not be everyone’s cup of Earl Grey, especially since it was purchased and retooled by Whitbred and then ABInBev, but this is the brew that my dad used to teach me about beer, his rambunctious youth in British pubs, and how to tell a good story over a pint of ale.

“The Cream of Manchester” is a standard English bitter, fiercely golden with a thick white head, that, outside of pubs dotting the northern English countryside, comes in tall yellow and black cans, each of which contains a floating beer widget. Hopefully my all-grain homebrew will be less like the stuff available in the US today, and more like the stuff my dad drank on tap back in Manchester during the late 70s and early 80s. He always said there was nothing quite like a cask-condition, freshly pulled pint of pub ale.

Stuff You’ll Need

For a five gallon batch:

6.2 lbs of 2-row malt (British preferred, American accepted)
4 oz of Crystal 40 (for that golden color)
1/2 oz Patent Black Malt (for roasted goodness, and a little more color)
1/3 lb of invert sugar (which requires brown cane sugar and citric acid, explained below)
1.25 oz Fuggles (for bitterness and aroma)
.75 oz Kent Goldings (for aroma and flavor)
British Ale Yeast (I used WhiteLabs WLP013 but WYeast 1098 should work well, too)

You’ll also need all of the standard all-grain brewing stuff, like a mash-tun, brew kettle, bucket, carboy, fire, spoon, etc.

Step 1: Mash it up

The first thing you’ll notice is that this isn’t very much grain for a 5 gallon batch. Most American Ale recipes call for at least 10 lbs of malt, and we’re nearly 4 lbs short of that here. That’s because Boddingtons is a pretty low ABV brew, bubbling in at thoroughly sessionable 3.9%.

Because it’s so little grain, it’s best to mash for a bit longer than normal, say 90 minutes instead of 60. Mash the 2-row and specialty malts at ~151 degrees, stirring once or twice to make sure there are no malty dough balls floating around. Sparge once to loose the sugars, settle the grain-bed by draining off a liter or so, then send the rest right into your kettle.

You might be surprised at how brown the wort is, but that’s OK. From my experience, the color of the beer in a carboy or other container is much, much darker than it is in a glass.

Step 2: Make some invert sugar

While the grain is mashing, you’ll want to start your invert sugar. For the record, you can buy something like Lyle’s Golden Syrup, but if you’re putting in the work for all-grain brewing, you might as well create all of the ingredients from scratch. Consider it a lesson in self-sufficiency. Or survival preparation. Your call.

Invert sugar is naturally found in a lot of fruits and honeys, but you can make it yourself by adding citric acid to normal cane sugar, and heating it in water. The citric acid breaks the bonds of the sucrose in the cane sugar, resulting in free fructose and glucose (which are both sweeter than regular old sucrose). For those curious, this is the same chemical structure as the dreaded high fructose corn syrup, but our version is made from completely different ingredients (namely: not corn).

You want to heat 1/2 a lb of cane sugar (not table sugar) in 3/4 a cup of water. As it’s heating, add 1/8 a teaspoon of citric acid. Let it simmer, stirring frequently, for at least 20 minutes. The longer it simmers the darker and thicker it will be. You don’t want it too dark or thick for this beer, so try not to simmer it for more than 30-40 minutes.

Step 3: Boil her up (or down, not sure how it works)

Now that your grain is mashed and your sugar is inverted, you can start your boil. As soon as it’s roiling enthusiastically, you’ll want to add 1 oz of your Fuggles and .5 oz of your Kent Goldings. Boil for another 45, stirring as your impatience dictates. Next, add your invert sugar, a teaspoon of Irish moss (or a whirlfloc, if that’s how you roll) and the rest of your hops. There are no hop additions at burnout for this recipe, so you just need to wait another 15 minutes. Now is a good time to drop your (cleaned and rinsed) wort-chiller into the beer so that the boil can do most of the sanitation work for you.

Step 4: Drink a beer and chill out (while the beer chills out)

I always try to drink something in the same style as what I’m brewing. Three guesses as to what I was drinking this time around.

This is a good time to use the excess water from your wort chiller to water your poor, droopy hydrangeas. You can also use some to hose the bird-poop off your car. Get creative with it.

This is also a good time to get an original gravity reading.

Step 5: Pitch your yeast

Around ~75-80 degrees you are ready to stir the hell out of your wort and pitch your yeast. Remember that the more oxygen the yeast has, the better it will get established, and the better it will attenuate. I sometimes seal my bucket and shake the hell out of it once the yeast is already in there, just to make sure it’s well distributed and has enough oxygen to breathe comfortably.

Step 6: Prime and bottle

Let the golden-brown joy ferment a week, then rack to secondary. Bottle by priming with 2/3 a cup of cane sugar. Let the beer very slightly carbonate (to mimic the traditional style) for another ~14-21 days.

That’s it! Enjoy one for me and my old man.

An Open Letter to my Bone Marrow

January 4, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Dear weird red squiggly stuff inside my bones,

I know we don’t sit down and talk very often (or ever, come to think). I know you probably feel neglected. I know that recently, we’ve had a pretty rocky relationship: me, falling off of ladders, you, refusing to fight off infections every time I go on vacation.

But for the most part, it’s been good, right? Twenty-seven years of relatively pleasant symbiosis? I gotta ask you for something pretty huge, and I hope that our shared history is enough for you to acquiesce.

I’m gonna need you to let some doctors suck you out through my hip bones so you can go live inside my dad.

I know it sounds weird. But it’s for a really good cause! He really needs my (your) help right now, and if you do this for me (us) I promise to take better care of you. I won’t drink that last beer when I’ve already had enough. I’ll eat more oranges and kale. I’ll even go running more, if that’s what you want.

All he needs is for you to go in there and do what you’ve been doing in me. Get all up in his immune system and go all Rambo on those Leukemia cells. Give him back his energy and life. Give the whole family renewed hope.

That’s all. I ask nothing more than for you to do your job somewhere else for a little bit. Think of it as getting to travel for work. All of the airfare and accommodations are covered, you just have to show up for the meetings.

On January 18, when you’re making that trip down the hall at Hopkins, remember this letter. If you won’t do it for me, do it for him. Do it because he deserves this for being a great man and a great father. Do it because he deserves a life free from the worries and weight of cancer. Do it because I still have so much left to learn from him and I want him around to see me become a man he’s proud of.

Do it because the world needs more people like him. More people full of optimism and humor, more people willing to face a challenge with a smile and a laugh, more people who rise to a challenge and beat it back with fierce determination.

Do it because I love him.

Yours, literally,
-Oliver

Do it, because, and I quote, "“During your teenage years you were a pain in the ass.Now I get to be a pain in yours.”

Do it, because, and I quote my dad, ““During your teenage years you were a pain in the ass. Now I get to be a pain in yours.”