Birthday Hopes and Dreams

After celebrating another birthday in May and experiencing a period of loss and change, I think of Thomas Pastorius, who passed away last year.  Considered the first microbrewer in Pennsylvania, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he also marked the coda of my high school journalism career when I interviewed him for one of my last articles in North Catholic’s Trojan News.  Unbeknownst to me at the time, he would open Penn Brewery at the bottom of Troy Hill Road by the Fall, while I was starting college.

Although my meeting with him was brief, he was a gracious and generous man who fed my fledgling ambition by basically giving me something grown-up to write about.  I am now in rather awe the prescience of standing and speaking with him in the dank and dark interior of the old Eberhardt and Ober brewery below my high school before its grand transformation.

But as life would have it, his dream of an on-site brewery and restaurant proved to be a high-maintenance job.  One’s passion could also produce much anxiety and frustrations–that much I too do understand.  Throughout my career, I’ve gone in and out of the thing I love to do most.

Another birthday does give me pause, and a refocusing of sorts is in order, for starters, infusing more positive energy and a healthier balance during work weeks.  And if I’m lucky, I may even capture a little of the thrill “Mr. Beer” once had of crafting brews–often times the hard but, in his mind, the right way.