There is a keg of beer on the kitchen table¹. It is there in connection with Beta’s high school graduation. This being Austria, my wife² bought it for the graduation ceremony at the school. This being Austria, it was not consumed entirely because 1) my wife had also organized prosecco for the buffet³ and 2) the chemistry class had also brewed a keg of hefeweizen.⁴
So some was left over and now it’s on the kitchen table⁵ and I and other beer drinkers in our family⁶ and social circle are being encouraged to drink it before my wife has to return it.
You can maybe see where this is heading. This is the point where I gracefully segue into talking about my kid and her graduation and how proud that makes me.
First, I wanted to mention where we went to celebrate her graduation. The restaurant, I mean.⁷
Before that, though: she played harp⁸ at the graduation ceremony. Part of her solo⁹ from our orchestra performances this year. Some people at her school, such as the principal, were surprised that she could play the harp. Beta had kept it a secret to avoid being asked to play, something she learned about in grade school, I guess.¹⁰
Anyway, this restaurant.
Oh, I also wanted to say how much the other kids impressed me too. Bunch of smart people.¹¹
The restaurant was pretty good. We went with my inlaws. Alpha’s parents were uncomfortable because it was urban and ritzy. The view was nice, it’s across the square from the big cathedral in Vienna. The prices reflect this, and the quality of the food, which is pretty good. Service was good too, until they got busy.¹²
I threatened Beta that I would make an embarrassing speech, as fatherly tradition requires,¹³ but she wasn’t horrified enough and I never really got a chance. I would have kept it short.
I would have said this:

Beta was born on [date] in [place] in Japan at [exact time] in the middle of a typhoon. She weighed [exact weight]. I rode my bicycle through the storm (carrying a small, transparent umbrella Japanese-style) to the hospital and got there in time to see them rolling her to the ambulance in a little portable pink incubator to take her to another hospital specializing in preemies. She looked very small, 38cm long, being born 10 weeks early. I visited her daily in the hospital after that, delivering milk her mother pumped.¹⁴ In the hospital they called me the milkman. Once my wife was well enough to go too, we went together.
The first time I visited her in the hospital, I disinfected my hands and put on a surgical gown and her doctor [name] gave me a tour and explained gently the risks she faced and that there was a 90% chance there would be no brain damage. She was so tiny, and yet when I looked around the ward, she was one of the largest babies there. They had 600 gram babies, too. They had a mentally damaged girl about 2 with no fingers or toes rolling around in one of those springy walker things kids roll around in rolling around the ward.
They had everything.¹⁵
Beta was small and yellow and hooked up to wires and had a feeding tube down her nose and was respirated for the first two or three days. “When can I touch her?” I asked the doctor and he said, “now if you like” and I reached into the incubator and she put her fingers¹⁶ around the tip of my right index finger. I managed not to cry, but only with great effort; I didn’t want to start a chain reaction and have all the babies in the ward start crying.¹⁷
Beta came home after a couple months and things went okay except, like, for me almost drowning her during her first bath¹⁸ or the bumping her head on the ceiling while tossing her in the air incident later on.
She appeared to develop normally except for never crawling (she rolled). Before she learned to talk, she had the scary habit of whispering when she was home alone with me and sleeping in the other room, but stopping whenever I went in to check on her.¹⁹
She learned to walk, from which point on trips to the grocery store down the street took ten times as long because she had to stop and pick up every single cigarette butt on the way. She liked the playground across the street especially the slides.
This is how we did the slides²⁰: I never told her to be careful or let her see how much it freaked me out. She climbed up the ladder,²¹ stood at the top for a while and slid down. Meanwhile, I stood behind her on the ground while she climbed, ready to catch her if she fell. Then I nervously waited for her while she stood at the top, trying to stand on the side of the slide she would fall out if she fell, and then ran around to the foot of the slide when she finally slid, and caught her.
And this is how things have gone for the last almost 18 years. Beta has explored her world with curiosity and without fear and I have done my best not to show her how scared I have been, in order to avoid passing any fear on to her, and to the best of my ability I have been there to catch her if she should happen to fall. And so far, things have worked out better than I ever dared dream or hope.

This is the speech I would have made, but I never got the chance.

¹In fact, the keg of beer was on the floor next to the table, and a refrigerating unit/tap thing was on the table. And only at the time this piece was conceived; they had already been returned at the actual time of writing. Also, point of advice for people with bad backs: never lift a beer keg or refrigeration unit for your wife out of the trunk^1a even if she assures you no one else can do it and it is only half empty after all because it is a)half full and b)designed to maximize stress on your lower back, and will cause a relapse
^1a…lift the keg etc out of the trunk, not the wife is out of the trunk…
²Alpha was head of the PTA thing at Beta’s school. The PTA never bought beer for graduation at my high school in America; we had to have someone’s older brother buy it for us, and we had to go camping in the woods to drink it.
³Note: be careful of the sandwiches at the buffet made from the little salty roll things and ham, even if they have attractive slices of pickle in them, because they will break your teeth!
⁴A little sweet and not bitter enough for my taste
⁵See footnote 1
⁶my father-inlaw and my brother-inlaw. We didn’t manage to finish it before Alpha returned it, either. I’m not a big beer drinker to begin with, and I was trying to lose weight. In fact, I still am. I’ve lost ten pounds so far! Mostly by avoiding alcohol and sugar. Except for the beer-keg week, and this weekend, when I went to the ice cream place with Gamma to celebrate her 4th grade report card.
⁷The name is Do&Co. Niki Lauda, who was a race car driver when I was a kid, hangs out there. The owner is the son of a man who had a great seafood restaurant in Vienna, and the seafood at Do&Co isn’t bad either. I had sort of a modern sushi thing and it was very nice. The bill for eight people came to double what I spent for my first car as a kid^7a and 50% more than what I paid for my second.^7b

^7a1958 Chevy Apache pickup (turquoise)
^7b197? VW Golf (dark blue)
⁸Camac brand. I forget the model. Athena maybe.
⁹Haydn
¹⁰You can imagine. Hey, Beta, my uncle is opening a dry cleaning shop, could you play a couple tunes at the grand opening?
¹¹It was a school for highly-gifted students. Why is education not the first priority of every society on earth? Why do we not endeavor to optimize the education and encouragement and help every single one of us receives at every age, especially children? Why do we not do all we can to identify everyone’s talents and maximize them?
¹²In fact, the service in the bar – which is all glass on one side so you’re lounging there with the cathedral right in your face – was bad. The waitress brought us menus and then ignored us until we went upstairs to eat. In revenge we ate all her peanuts.
¹³My father, in fact, was not the speech-making type. True fatherly tradition^13a, for me, would consist of remaining silent yet polite, and telling the kid later on in private how proud I was.

^13aBy true fatherly tradition I mean tradition handed down from my father. In contrast to fatherly tradition extrapolated from observing fathers as represented in the popular culture.
¹⁴From her own breasts with a small electrical pump. Not from like a cow or something.
¹⁵By this I mean, they represented the entire spectrum of what could go wrong or right with a premature infant. Beta turned out to represent what could go right.
¹⁶Her fingers, like the rest of her body, were translucent and as sticky and fragile as the fingers of some rainforest tree frog.
¹⁷That joke, in fact, was first made by my father when I called him after that first visit and tried to describe how I felt, almost 18 years ago.
¹⁸We bathed her in the bathroom sink and I got her face in the suds while washing her back and she held her breath and began turning blue. We gently patted her and blew into her face and so on and eventually she resumed respiration.
¹⁹It made me feel like an expendable character in the first reel of a horror movie.
²⁰Which were made from blue-painted steel tube frames and shiny metal slide-parts, and were located next to the freeway across from Tokyo Disneyland.
²¹In the Osh Kosh B’gosh overalls her grandmother had sent from the United States.