Dont Stifle the Trifle

This was an incredible week. Some of it I will talk about Thursday in the Living by Making Substack. Some I want to talk about now. After getting home wiped out on Friday night, I needed something brainless and chill to do Saturday. I really needed to work at the awesome Art Affair at the Prairie Arts Center, but in all honesty, I could barely think, barely move. I didn't have the energy. I decided on a few short rounds of pickleball to try and work out just some of the road, then go home and rest.

A great surprise while I was playing. Three previous student athletes came to play for just a few minutes. Long enough to say hi and make arrangements to meet the next day to catch up. What a blessing. The next day we had a great time chatting, and it was the best ninety minutes I've had in a long time. Being there with them threw me back to our cross-country days, camps, breakfast runs, murder mysteries, team dinners, and the legend lore I created for each of my students. I Never talked about the legend I created for each student, they didn’t really know about it, but….

For years, around a campfire or a table mid game of spoons at cross country camp or team dinners, I've had a habit. On rare occasions out loud, but most typically in my brain, as the spoons were flying and junky snack food was being consumed. It was my way of remembering, of calming an overactive ADD brain, a feeble attempt at living in the moment. The habit? I'd look around at each kid and consider what their future looks like. Not a vague fortune. A whole bit. A business, a brand, a legend built out of who they actually are from my limited perspective, stretched just far enough to be funny and true at the same time. It was always positive, because I truly believe the student athletes I had in cross country and art are legends. Each of them. So, I named this habit T-LORE. Tio's Legendary Origin and Reputation Engine. The machinations aren't legendary. The peeps who go through the machine are. 

T-LORE is that habit with a name on it. It's part prophecy, part roast, part love letter. Every kid who's sat at that table or by the campfire has a legend waiting. There's something about watching kids you used to coach grow into whoever they're becoming that I never get tired of. I want to live a little vicariously through them, honestly. Ask them what they're dreaming about now.
That want is the same one that built T-LORE in the first place, and after I retired, I started bringing the machine out of my head and onto paper. Partly to honor what's been the biggest blessing of my working life, and partly, if I'm honest, to hang onto that season a little while longer. I want to notice the everyday little things, the small stuff before it slides by unremarked. Don't stifle the trifle.
So with that introduction of how the legends were created at a small private schools cross country team, this one belongs to Madi….

Everybody at school knows Madi. Sweetest soul we've ever had come through cross country and probably the school. Truly. Prays for you before you know you need it. Prays for the counselors. Prays for the teachers, the students, the admin, the Priests, the parishioners, the….. you get the idea. She is a prayer warrior, lives her faith out loud. Probably prayed for the spider before somebody stepped on it at camp. Just being around Madi, being in her presence, brought a certain calmness and comfort, almost like a warm blanket on a cold winter day.

But there's a second Madi. Lurking silently just below the surface. You only meet her at the table, when the cards come out, when somebody says the word spoons. Something happens to her eyes. The prayer warrior doesn't leave. She just switches targets. Instead of asking the Lord for mercy, she starts taking spoons out of eight-year olds' hands like she's disarming ordnance. Warrior instinct intact, loaded and searching for the next target. Brutal.

Somewhere in the middle of one of those games, Madi figured something out about herself. The same fire that made her fierce at that table was the same fire that was going to make her the best teacher some little kid ever had. Five-year-olds, twenty of them, first week of school, crying, scared, and somewhere in that room is a woman who once dove across a table for a spoon and would do it again for one of her kids.

So, she did what any reasonable prayer warrior with a competitive streak and a taste for a good beer would do. She started a brewery. Called it Mercenary Madi's, because that's who shows up when it counts. Whether it's a spoons game or a kid who needs someone in their corner. And the flagship line carries the name of her early career. WMD. Weapons of Mass Detention. Every teacher who has ever survived a Monday knows the feeling. Madi just figured out how to bottle it. Below is the complete current flight of offerings from Mercenary Madi.

Mercenary Madi at cards. Image created with Midjourney, not hand painted.

WMD, Weapons of Mass Detention, is the flagship IPA. The one that started it all. Hoppy, sharp, built to survive a Monday morning carpet time meltdown. The name works two ways on purpose. WMD, why Mondays drag, and what happens to a kid's recess when Madi's had enough.

Snowplow Stout is named for the parent who shows up ready to clear a path nobody asked them to clear. Thick, dark, opaque. You genuinely cannot see through it, same as you cannot see past that parent to have an actual conversation about the kid. High ABV, because it takes more than one to recover from a meeting that started with, “I don't think my child should have consequences.”

Snow Day Saison is born from the six a.m. text chain that changes everything. Light, bubbly, a little giddy in the glass. The beer equivalent of pajamas and a second cup of coffee. Brewed for the day you got back but didn't earn but loved every second of anyway.

PDP, Personal Day Porter, is for the day you almost didn't take, and a play on the district's always impressive, always looked forward to, after summer break personal development days. Dark, slow, a little heavy. A porter isn't a beer you rush, and neither is a mental health day. Madi spends the first hour of every PDP feeling guilty about it and the rest of the day remembering exactly why she needed it. Reframing PD for the positive. Now we love PD days.

Other Duties Dubbel covers the clause in every teaching contract, "and other duties as assigned." Nobody reads it until they're doing recess duty, lunch duty, hallway duty, coat zipping duty, and detention in the same week, and it's six below, windy, and there are no more boxes of Kleenex in the storage closet. A Belgian dubbel fits because dubbel means double, and nothing captures doing double duty quite like it. Can you focus on teaching the rest of the day? Used up. Would you mind updating your curriculum tonight? It's been a week.

Red Tape Red Ale is for the meetings, the paperwork, the forms that exist to generate more forms. Medium body, nothing flashy. Steady and a little numbing, same as a district in service day.

Brewed by a prayer warrior. Served by a spoons champion. Poured for every teacher who made it to Friday.

This felt like the right week for Madi's legend to make it to paper, since a lot of Nebraska teachers are heading back to school for In Service and PD days right about now. I'll admit, I miss it…well maybe not that part. There are pieces of that season I truly will miss, but to the teachers serving us as you head back this week, this one's for you. Bottoms up.

Keep making, keep growing, be you.

Tio

PS-Listen to Madi's song below.