Frosty mug

   
     You know what made car alarms so annoying? They never stopped. They went on and on and on and on and on. And on. And on and on and on and...
     You get it. Plus, inevitably there wasn't anyone actually breaking into the car that was shrieking in front of your apartment in the middle of the night.
     Which makes the annoyance of car alarms different from the present situation in our country, where indeed a criminal is right now trying to steal our country, abusing peaceful residents one day, defacing public monuments the next, all the while planning to corrupt our election system so he and his cronies can never be removed from power no matter how unpopular they become. The danger is very immediate and real.
     So no false alarms here. Constant warning, as loud as possible, is justified, maybe even essential.
     But also deadening. Soul-sucking. So the strategy at EGD is to occasionally turn our gaze away from the horrific shit show in Washington — and increasingly around the country — and regard something that doesn't suck.
     Such as this frosty mug of A & W root beer I was served earlier this month in Weston, Michigan. I hadn't eaten at an A & W in 20 years, if not more, if ever. But we were driving my brother's hot new Audi Q6 — an all-electric SUV, it seemed a challenge to get it to Ontonagon without ending up on the side of the road. And was. Planning was required.
     So we were making one of three pitstops required to make the seven hour drive, timed for an early lunch, and walked over to this A & W. Where I ordered a double cheeseburger and a diet — thank you Mr. Diabetes! — root beer.
     "Do you want that in a frosty mug?" the clerk asked.
     I was taken aback — a frosty glass mug? In a fast food joint? it's as if I spied a worker seated next to the deep fryer, churning butter.
     "Hell yes!" I said, or words to that effect, and she produces from a cold case a big, heavy, indeed frosty glass mug.
     The sugarless root beer was quite good, as was the cheeseburger — I had a hunch that A & W fare wouldn't be the queasy, why-did-I-put-that-in-my-mouth? offal found at McDonald's. After we ate, when I went to deposit my garbage at the can by the door, I placed my mug on a tray, along with all the other used mugs, and marveled at this nod to tradition, which required an expenditure of time, effort, much mug washing, and no doubt considerable breakage. I thought maybe A & W Restaurants were family-owned; they're not. But they are the only major restaurant chain that is franchisee-owned, meaning someone closer to the customers decided to go to the effort to keep the frosty mug tradition alive.
     It's worth it. As was the typically glorious weekend at Ontonagon, complete with cigars, sauna, tomahawk steak, conversation, lake swimming, and the largest beach bonfire ever constructed by mankind, in my estimation. On the way back, we stopped in Weston again, topped up the battery, and hit the A & W, where I ordered exactly the same thing: double cheeseburger, frosty mug of diet root beer. It was still good.
     Does the persistence of the A & W frosty glass mug in the annus horribilis of 2025 counterbalance the destruction of democracy, the erosion of freedom, the encouragement of the cruel and the dampening of hopes of any of this ending anytime soon, if at all? No. Not in the slightest. But it's not nothing, and at this point I'll take any glimmer I can get. America may not be great, anymore, but it is still good, at certain times and in certain places.