Turning 40 Family Tavern Tour

    We choose not to revisit some places on our list. Perhaps it’s better to simply remember our afternoons at Leinie’s Lodge—neither a bar nor our past third place—where we’d stop by to drink a complimentary beer and to sign the guestbook as international visitors. Did I really think anyone would believe I was Patti Von See from Austria? Oh yeah.

    And we scratch off Schrek’s Place in Tilden. This used to be the Villa (technically Mary’s Country Villa) back when Karen and I thought we were the original wedding crashers. Every Saturday night, June through August, was a wedding dance offering free beer and pop for guests, and we did our best to look like we belonged. If a bartender asked where our parents were, we’d point vaguely at the dance floor and say, “Out there.” Every Saturday night Karen and I danced and sweated and danced some more.

    The building still advertises FOOD stenciled on its roof in enormous black letters you can’t miss from Highway 53. And across the road, another roof stencil reads MOTEL. Last year when I was at the Villa for my niece’s wedding (the first time here as an invited guest) I thought I might run into a ghost of my former wedding crasher self on this same worn dance floor where I first slow danced with a man. His name was Joe Something, and he was wearing suspenders but no shirt, his huge pecs built from throwing hay bales. Or maybe that ghost of teenaged me is sneaking cigarettes—in the women’s room with its same leaky faucet and mildewed caulk—behind stalls so tiny that the suicide doors can only open out. I used to patron the Villa as an anonymous guest, a girl blending into the crowd. A bar can never be considered your third place if nobody knows your name.

    Bouvier. His name was Joe Bouvier.

    The summer I turned twenty-one, I went to the tavern for its possibility. No one knew what would happen over the course of the evening, who would walk in and change your life. At twenty-two, I married a bartender from my favorite bar, expecting we’d raise a house full of children—a basketball team at least—and go on a weekly date to the tavern like our parents did.

    This summer I’m a forty-year-old college teacher who gets tipsy on two light beers and is bothered by second-hand smoke, someone who’s crabby if she doesn’t exercise every day. In other words, I’ve become the kind of woman I used to make fun of: a lightweight.

    Now I go to my current third place, The Joynt, perhaps because of its predictability. Friday or Saturday, early evening, I expect to take a stool near the owner, Bill Nolte, and his longtime sweetheart, Kathleen Nelson. Each time, I’m glad to see them to talk about books or movies or travels or people—what I’ve always wanted to talk about in a tavern.

    Sociologist Oldenburg says that a third place is important not only to help you establish a sense of place and a connection to your community, but also for maintaining civility, civic engagement, even democracy. Pretty heady stuff for a tavern.

    Tonight at the Joynt something happens out of the ordinary. It’s a bar, after all, and there’s always an element of nobody knows, again and again. A guy in flip-flops and bad teeth walks up the sidewalk with a lawn mower and starts it right outside the open door. He lets it run long enough for the bar to fill with exhaust then shuts off the motor and walks towards us. He asks for Bill.

    “No Bill here,” someone says.

    Bill says, “Why do you want him?”

    The guy says to sell him a lawn mower.

    “No grass to mow,” Kathleen says. True enough, they live above the bar.

    This could only happen in a Wisconsin tavern: some goofy guy trying to sell a lawn mower inside the bar on Saturday night.

    As we watch the guy push his mower down the street, Bill says, “You know, no one looks smart in flip-flops.”