Eddie, my oldest kid and one of a very few people on earth who has to talk to me, leaves for college next month. I’m not dealing with it real well. A couple nights ago, it hit me that we’ve only got four more Wing Wednesdays until he goes.
The thought came to me while we were housing discounted wings at Duffy’s, a D.C. bar and wing spot we frequent, and not because of the theme that has taken over my workplace this week. For us, every week is Wings Week; I've waxed gluttonic on it in the past and I have the receipts. Hell, we’ve gone out for wings three times in the past six days, including another wings-informed road trip to Philadelphia over the weekend that made a cameo on this very site.
It's hard to remember exactly when wings went from what we eat to what we do, but I know where it started: Nanny O'Brien's, a treasured D.C. pub with plenty of TVs, local character, and fab food. We started going there as a family when Eddie and his younger brother Eamon were in elementary school. My wife dropped out pretty early on, thinking that might enhance the male bonding experience. The boys and I became regulars at Nanny’s on Wednesday nights when the bar offered half-price wings. None of us drank booze, but we were regular enough visitors to Wing Wednesday that bartenders would set up a round of sodas for us whenever we walked in, making us feel like we meant as much to Nanny’s as it did to us. And it meant a lot. Happiness was watching sports with my kids in a neighborhood bar. Watching sports and eating wings with my kids in a neighborhood bar was something more.
Our relationship with Nanny’s and wings grew deeper than platonic during the 2019 baseball season. Eamon isn’t as much a wings or baseball guy as his brother, so he’d skip a week here and there, but Eddie and I were hitting every Wing Wednesday just as the Washington Nationals began to turn things around, and soon enough we were joking that our team’s worst-to-first dreams depended on us not missing a week. Then, we weren’t joking. We held up our end of the magical pact for the rest of the season, and the Nats held up theirs. This was the stuff memories are made of. When the Nats won Game 7 of the World Series with us watching at Nanny’s on a Wing Wednesday, it felt like destiny.
During the pandemic, Nanny’s shut down with the rest of the world. The bar reopened, but without Wing Wednesdays, so we looked elsewhere to sate our cravings. We took drives to Philadelphia to visit Moriarty’s, a great pub in Center City, to binge eat its deservedly prized wings. Those trips were routinely incredible, but not something me and the boys could do every week.
Duffy’s Irish Pub to the rescue. The DuPont Circle bar opened post-pandemic with wall-to-wall big screens and Wing Wednesday half-price specials. We became certified regulars. “See you next week,” the Duffy’s bartender said as we left two nights ago. Yes, you will.
A few months ago, we added Wing Mondays to our weekly schedule, at the legendary Georgetown bar, The Tombs. We could make a car payment, or defray imminent tuition costs, with our current monthly wing bill. There's bang for these bucks, of course.
Our new hangout was an old hangout for me. My buddies and I used to go to The Tombs in high school in the late 1970s—not for wings, but cheap pitchers of sangria, a favorite drink for kids in our day. Walking inside the place with Eddie triggered hazy memories of my last visit to the bar, when we were caught trying to run the check because my pal Mark tripped and fell on the street in front of the creepy Exorcist Steps. (I blame sangria, Satan, and Mark.) That was just before my gang left for college, as Eddie will soon. He's already found a spot with a Thursday night wings special.
The Tombs reunion and big changes afoot in our family had me thinking a lot lately about some boozy counsel Mark doled out many years ago, at a backyard cookout. He was ostensibly warning me not to overcook a steak I was grilling for the gang, but inebriation made him go deep. I have one shot at getting things right with that meat, Mark said, like a lot of things in life. So don’t blow it. “You can’t get that back,” he said.
Over the years I’ve mulled Mark’s Weber-side wisdom as much as I have any poet’s couplet or dirtball rock lyric. We're still close, and I remind him of his drunken genius to this day. This past Monday afternoon, it came to mind yet again. Eddie came downstairs and asked if we were going for wings at The Tombs. It was literally 100 degrees outside in D.C., and I was still drained from the weekend trip to Philly. Then I thought about the sands of time, and how our worlds won't be the same in a matter of weeks. Eddie and I went to The Tombs for wings that night, and it was fantastic. I’ll miss this.
