There’s a great brewery here in Birmingham called Back Forty Beer Company. They began a little north in Gadsden but in 2018 they built a magnificent palace to beer, burgers, pizza, sports, and outdoor fun with room for football games and fire pits.

I was there last Saturday in the late afternoon with my wife and two sons, my sister-in-law and her husband and two kids, and my mother-in-law.

We hadn’t taken the kids in a few years, and not because it was the scene of then six-year-old’s last and greatest temper tantrum – He wanted a double decker burger that was bigger than his head, much less his mouth, and he was furious that I ordered the already oversized single burger for him instead. There was flopping and screaming. We haven’t been back because we just don’t get out that much. I hear that’s not an unusual thing lately.

This time we sat outside at one of the picnic tables and that six-year-old tantrum thrower, now eight and more ready to appeal to reason, came up to the table of adults and was near tears. He’d been throwing a football around with a bunch of kids and one of them called him an idiot.