On Writing and Storytelling: The Taste of Memory

🍺 The Taste of Memory: How Beer Became a Quiet Motif of Emotional Growth in the Garratyverse

In Reunion: Coda, beer isn’t just a beverage—it’s a threshold. When Mark Prieto hands Jim Garraty his first Heineken, it’s not about rebellion. It’s about presence. About offering comfort without commentary. About saying, I see you, in the language of clinking bottles and shared silence.

“You’ve officially lost your beer virginity, Jimmy boy,” Mark teased, his blue-gray eyes twinkling with the kind of camaraderie that comes from years of friendship.
“Maybe next year,” he added, “you’ll be sharing a beer with a girl…”

That line—playful, tender, and quietly loaded—was never meant to be prophetic. But it became one. Because in Comings and Goings – The Art of Being Seen, Jim does share a beer with a girl. And it’s not just any girl—it’s Kelly Moore, whose emotional fluency and quiet strength echo Mark’s in a different key.

“Cold. Crisp. It tasted steadier now, like the beer had learned something, or maybe I had.”

That’s the emotional hinge. The callback doesn’t land as irony—it lands as fulfillment. Jim isn’t just older. He’s steadier. He’s no longer the boy who couldn’t say what he needed to say. He’s the young man who knows how to stay.

Kelly doesn’t crowd him. She lets silence breathe. She plays Billy Joel’s “This Night,” a song her father said “always felt like it was trying not to fall apart.” And when she leans in—not as a test, but as an offering—Jim doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t flee. He stays.

“I didn’t need to run. I didn’t need to explain. I just needed to be here. And I was.”

The Heineken, then, becomes a quiet throughline. From Reunion: Coda to Comings and Goings, it marks emotional thresholds: first sip, first confession, first kiss, first moment of staying. It’s not flashy. It’s not symbolic in the capital-L literary sense. But it’s emotionally true. And in the Garratyverse, that’s what matters.