BUT THE Plough is more than just a bar. And the thing that distinguishes it from the rest — more than the food, the footie, the music, or even the Guinness — is its never-ending parade of characters: the trust-fund drifters, the fast-drinking idlers, the part-time revolutionaries, the armchair intellectuals, the inveterate cynics, the hard-core romantics, the tortured artists, the shaggy throwbacks, the lanky trendies, the globular drunks. Anywhere else, many of these people would be seen as misfits, crackpots. At the Plough, they are who they are: regulars.

One of the more colorful Plough characters was a guy named Steve. Bearded, balding, and invariably gruff, Steve was the bar’s resident expert on everything: there was no subject too arcane or complex for his know-how, no current event about which he didn’t know more than was printed in the papers. You could be a nuclear scientist and Steve would be happy to explain the finer points of fission to you. You could be Michael Jordan and Steve would tell you why you weren’t getting those slam-dunks quite right. If he couldn’t win you over with his steamroller logic, he’d get the better of you through sheer volume. And the ace up his sleeve was a sneaky, dust-dry sense of humor.

One afternoon, a local musician named Mickey Bones walked into the Plough and handed the bartender a press kit with a tape of his music. The bartender put the tape on, and everyone settled back to listen. Mickey, however, had accidentally handed over a blank tape, and the men at the bar found themselves listening intently to nothing but silence. " So far, " said Steve after a minute or so, " I like it. "

Steve always sat on the same stool at the same corner of the bar, and God help you if you tried to usurp it. On one occasion, he was sitting in his spot, an empty stool on either side, when a woman approached and asked if he would move over so she and her friend could sit together. " I ain’t going nowhere, " he replied. And so the two women sat on either side of him and began to converse, loudly. Steve sighed, looked up at the bartender, and said, " Now I know how the Palestinians feel. "

There’s no more Steve at the Plough these days: he gave up drinking and took up bird watching. You can still see him there, though. A corner of the Plough has been turned into a sort of rogues’ gallery of regulars, a jumble of ink-on-napkin portraits drawn by an English expat named Roger Carter. It’s dispiriting to note how many of these guys have fallen away over the years — Jerry the malapropian warbler, John the swindling cardsharp, Eric the taciturn magician, Jerry the narcoleptic, Bruno the heartthrob, Racetrack Willie, Big Thurman — those who sobered up, moved away, or simply kicked the bucket.

One day in July, I walked into the Plough and saw a note on the chalkboard: philip, r.i.p. Phil, who was 53 years old when he died, had been going to the Plough for a good quarter-century. In recent years, illness had taken its toll on his body and mind, and he would come into the bar to bum butts and beer. Yet you got the sense that there was something else to these visits, that Phil was seeking more than handouts. You sensed he wanted to see familiar faces, to feel that he was still a part of something larger — that thing Ken Reeves calls " the Plough family. "

And Reeves is right. The Plough’s not always a happy family, but it’s a family all the same — one that has somehow held together for 32 years. A week or so after Phil’s death, I walked into the bar and saw the usual clusters of regulars laughing, debating, buying each other drinks. Up on the chalkboard there was a new announcement: mary had a little girl! Mary is a bartender at the Plough. Her daughter’s name is Ashlyn. She has tiny feet, a darling face, and, already, a head of thick dark hair.