The Roseville Hotel had closed many years ago, and the rooms upstairs had been converted to apartments, but the bar on the ground floor was still called the Roseville Hotel, because everyone was used to the name.
One Saturday in January, John James and two of his friends were sitting at the bar drinking small golden glasses of beer. It was very cold outside but sunlight came through the red curtains, giving the bar the look of a painting, one left unfinished, as if the painter had forgotten it and never returned to the room where it waited.
On the wall above the liquor bottles there were two hockey sticks with taped blades and a pair of scarred leather skates that hung by cotton laces on a nail. The sticks and the skates made a little shrine to the sport of hockey, which someone associated with the bar must have played at one time. It was that middle part of Saturday afternoon when it seems like it will be Saturday afternoon for two or three weeks.
John and his friends Sylvia Marsh and Richard van Fossen were the only ones in the bar except for the bartender, Alf Minor.
Around three thirty Alf brought a keg up from the back room and got down behind the bar to hook it up. Alf Minor had a silver ponytail and wore tiny golden stars in his ears. He was the last of the Minor family in Roseville and was always humming and singing to himself. Other people were not fond of Alf ’s singing and he himself seemed barely aware that they could hear it. It was almost a mania with him. One fall he’d sung that Sheena Easton song about the morning train so often and with so little regard for the actual lyrics that people asked him to please stop. So then he sang “Red River Valley” for a month or two. He always moved on to new songs eventually, and what he sang on this afternoon was “Darling, I love you, but give me Park Avenue.”
“What’s that?” Sylvia said.
Alf stood and dried his hands on a red flannel rag. “A big street in New York City.”
“I know what Park Avenue is. The song, I mean.”
“It’s from a TV show called Green Acres.”
“I don’t think I ever saw it.”
“Well, you wouldn’t have,” said Alf. “You’re too young. You’re all too young to know about Green Acres.”
“Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor,” said Richard van Fossen, who was quite knowledgeable about many things that he didn’t need to know.
“We’re not that young,” Sylvia said. “I’m twenty-nine, and John and Richard are twenty-eight.”
“I’m twenty-nine,” said Richard.
Sylvia turned toward Richard quickly, as if she hadn’t realized he was there. “You had a birthday.”
“Two weeks ago. Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I got myself a new pair of shoes.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t remember.”
“Children, please,” said Alf.
“Tell us what happens in Green Acres,” John said.
Alf folded the red rag and began polishing the tap handle. “It was a very funny show,” he said. “Ahead of its time in terms of breaking the so-called fourth wall. This lawyer named Oliver Wendell Douglas and his wife, Lisa, move out to a farm in the country, but, as the song says, she misses the lights and excitement of the city. This is the basic premise, and there are many complications. Oliver wants to be a real farmer, but he isn’t very good with his hands, so their house is always falling apart.”
“That sounds like my house,” John said.
“What’s wrong with it?”
