Between ages 20 and 30, many of us were artists, writers or musicians. We painted houses, tended bars, waited tables, but we also tried to get our poems published, painted or sculpted all night, or rehearsed with our bands, be they called Missing Foundation, Strapping Fieldhands or Baby Flamehead. With slim evidence, we believed we were special, and maybe we were, even if it has come to nothing.

I’m 47 now, and yesterday, I ran into Scott Lee, whom I hadn’t seen in more than a decade. He hasn’t changed much, just a tad pudgier at 43. Still the same black, thick rimmed glasses, the grinning, easygoing manner. “Hey, let’s go for a beer,” I suggested. We were standing just outside a Hard Rock Café. “Want to go in there?” Scott asked.

“Hell, no, let’s go to a real place.”

“We can go to the beer garden?”

“OK.”

The beer garden is located inside Reading Terminal, an indoor market with many eateries, mostly ethnic, and stalls selling specialty foods. You can have scrapple served by an Amish lady under a bonnet, try some obscure cheese, take home a hunk of swordfish. Though not really a beer garden, this bar is not a bad place to sit. A bit touristy. Yuengling, a not too special, local beer, is treated like a micro brew here, and charged accordingly. No background music, which is nice. This afternoon, a quiet television showed Phillies vs. Mets.

For about 15 years, Scott and I were regulars at Dirty Frank’s, a low-life, vaguely artistic bar, with junk paintings and photographs, earnest and inept, sometimes funky, on its wall. The juke box was pretty good, though. I remember hearing Patsy Cline, and Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing,” with Gene Krupa’s joyously manic drumming.

I’ve written about Frank’s before. In a poem, I mentioned Skinny Dave, the trust funded junkie. He’s gone now. Hey, the next one’s on me, Skinny! Seeing me scrawl on a scrap of paper once, Skinny blurted, “You’re lucky you can do that. I have nothing to do.” I’ve likened Sheila, the bartender, to Sheila-na-Gig, whom she’d never heard of, though it’s her namesake. “It’s an Irish goddess stretching out her enormous vulva, like this,” and I made a motion with my hands, like Superman ripping open his shirt.

Before the internet, one had to leave one’s apartment to chatter, so the bar was the obvious destination, but even if there were other places to socialize, we probably wouldn’t have gone anyway, because we were truly fond of our liquid bread, sharpened, every now and then, with a shot of Jameson. Who are “we”? Me, Scott and so many others, hundreds of millions of others. In any case, there was nowhere else for us to loiter and gaze, so our boozy ways could be scientifically blamed on our alienating environment. We had no choice, man, we had to drink to be social.