ge·müt·lich·keit

n. Warm friendliness; amicability. [German, from gemütlich, congenial; see gemütlich.

For Father's Day I was treated to dinner at one of my favorite restaurants. But I have to step back and explain that long before it was a restaurant, it was a Hardware store that began in Evansville during the 19th century. For those of you following the blog that are younger than 20...a hardware store is not where you found CPUs, IPhones and networking cables...it is where one went to pickup an anvil, a saddle, a scythe (modern equivalent...weed trimmer), or horse liniment!

I hate to admit this but as a very young child...I remember coming here with my Dad to get supplies for our horses. The walls were completely lined with metal bins where a boy could spend hours on end searching for that special treasure to take home with him. Weird things that boys had never seen before. Something metal, with leather straps that had shiny brads or a long blade with a wooden handle or an old photograph of a man with mustache and beard outside the store watering his horse at the trough. Whether you are 17 or 70....each of us has those memories of mysterious places that we went to in our youth...not understanding what it was all about but our young curiosities were engaged and the things we saw inside were forever burned into our memory. This was one of those places for me.

At the dinner were three generations of men...once boys...me, my Dad (85) and my son (23). Strange how we all found commonalities here in this old hardware store...now a German restaurant. My Dad and I talked about those days when we went together to this Hardware store to pick up hoof trimmers...I always had to leave with something from one of those bins along the wall. My son and I counted the number of international beers the restaurant offered and we figured out that between the two of us...we had sampled 84 of the 100 beers that lined the walls...the beers that now replaced the old metal bins.

This old German restaurant held all 3 of us captive in discussions of the past and the future...three guys of different generations that for 2 and half hours talked of things we had in common...not of generation gaps or politics but of family and fatherhood.

It was a perfect Father's day for three guys from Southern Indiana.