Finding out my adrenal gland still works

I was bottling some India pale ale on our back deck this weekend, busy filling the bottles before I cap them, when I found out that my adrenal gland still works.

I prefer to bottle with someone else—it’s pretty much a two-person job. The beer is in a bucket with a spigot, I attach a hose to that with a nozzle so that, when you press the nozzle into the bottom of an empty bottle, the beer flows, filling the bottle. One person fills bottles, the other uses the bottle-capper contraption to stamp the soft metal caps on and seal the bottles.

It’s a pleasant enough way to spend an afternoon, with a little music or a ballgame on in the background, and maybe some fully conditioned and chilled beer handy in a glass, too.

It had been a sunny morning so, as I cleaned, sterilized and rinsed bottles, I had our large deck umbrella open. It’s about seven feet tall and opens wide, so it casts a decent shadow, which is helpful as beer and sunshine do not mix. After rinsing the bottles I set them on an old white plastic deck table we have, pretty rickety, but fine for outdoor furniture, and good for letting the bottles dry, except that it’s pretty unstable.

In the afternoon the wind picked up a bit—it often does in the Bay Area. Cool air and fog are sucked through the Golden Gate by the heat of the Central Valley, so the valleys and canyons of the east bay hills get a lot of wind, and it can get pretty breezy along the bay, too.

I was maybe half way through when a solid gust hit, and I looked up to see that the wind had tilted the deck umbrella off balance. Right toward the rickety white table. Loaded with empty bottles. In a split second I realized what would happen once that umbrella toppled completely over, hitting the table, and sending all those sterile bottles flying like bowling pins all over and off the deck, crashing to the grass and the cement patio below. Mayhem, I tell you, mayhem would happen, and not only that—all my work in cleaning those bottles, would be gone, too.

I suppose the insides of the bottles that didn’t break would still be sterile. But I didn’t really have time to think it through that far. In the second or so I had for the dawning realization of how very bad it would be for that umbrella to continue toppling over onto that table full of squeaky clean bottles the only real thought I remember is I think I can get there in time.

Two steps, and a dive. I caught the pole in my left hand and pushed up, to get fully underneath it – the wind didn’t help, but I got it centered again and set it straight down. I moved a heavy pot full of dirt over onto the end of it, to keep it planted, so to speak.

In an instant it occurred to me how much extra work I had just been saved. Do you ever have moments like that, where you’re just plugging along, getting the stuff on your to-do list to-done, and disaster is averted to make you very grateful for the status quo you were taking for granted a few seconds earlier?

I was thankful in that moment, and thankful, too, that my adrenal gland still seems to be in good working order. To all of our glands, in good working order, hear, hear!

I paused to toast, then got busy bottling and capping my IPA again.