To Be A Publican Forever?

I saw the title and read it based on it. Heh. That would be Kevin Barry's 'The Pub with No Beer', published in The New Yorker on April 4, 2022. Set in a family-run Irish pub shuttered by the pandemic, the now-owner is now uhhh very free. There're no customers. 

He still hangs out in the empty space, and 'hears voices', which are likely his memories of when the pub was full of humans, customers, friends and neighbors. He remembers his father and what he used to do for a whole lifetime. His father had said, "To be a publican was a lifelong performance." This is especially true of many small family businesses passed down for generations. There isn't an indication that it might or it will be passed on down further.

In a small town somewhere along the desolate Irish coast, this pub stood empty for months as pandemic lockdowns stayed. There was no beer and no ice; there was still whisky, bottles of it. While bottles of whisky could be poured out into glasses and shared, local COVID rules dictated that it couldn't be sold as businesses were supposedly closed. People stroll by, but there's no point lingering. Although one neighbor acquaintance walked in for a drink and memories stirred. There was time for the community to pause, think and reflect. 

For three generations behind this bar much the same set of thick, knitted eyebrows had insisted on a semblance, at least, of decorum. The sunlight crept by slow inches across the floor. It was the moment, in more usual times, of the primary school’s letting out and he missed the high excited chatter from the yard across the way. Neither loudness nor drunkenness in this barroom had ever been tolerated.

“There is such a thing as a thoughtful pub,” his father had always maintained.

With time on his hands and 'emptiness', the now-owner spent a lot of time thinking, reflecting and dreaming. He wondered if it was time to close the pub, and do something else. He wasn't sure if he'd get the price he wanted, at what it was worth. He was tired, and didn't know if he could continue doing this. 

He was alone with the voices. He wanted to be away from them. He wanted to travel past himself and across the fields of the bay and beyond the horizon and into the equinox, into the light.

The author felt that the story is pertinent since pubs aren't just about the beer but they're also quite social hubs in rural communities. Once the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 came in, the usual hustle and bustle stopped, and people looked inward. As deprived of social interactions some felt, many also had the space to dream and create. 

The other great sense from the pandemic period was of the past as an unstable entity. There was so little going on in the present tense of our lives; we all spent a great deal of time thinking about the past. And we realized then that the past is shifting and rearranging all the time back there. The past is just a story that we keep on telling ourselves in different ways, in different renditions.