holidays
Hot Toddies and Blathering
You had to drink beer. I didn't matter that you didn't like it.
I lived in the great frozen tundra of Milwaukee for seven years. I did, rather painfully, eventually acclimate to the winters, but it was slow process. The first year I was sure I was going to die. The second year I just wanted to. By the third year, I grumbled more than the natives, but could, on occasion, set foot out of the house between October and May without long johns.
Compared to the buckle of the Bible belt that is West Virginia, folks in Milwaukee drink a lot. I think by anybody’s standards, they drink a lot. The cold has something to do with it. Nevertheless, beer is a perennial favorite. No kidding, I went to a church social one time and they served beer.
Milwaukeeans drink beer year-round, but in winter, usually at the holidays, the hot drinks start appearing. Another Milwaukee passion, schnapps is poured into hot chocolate when not drunk straight. Schnapps in one guise or another will appear all year, but Christmas and New Year’s is the time for Tom & Jerrys, hot buttered rum, eggnog and assorted warmer-uppers with a buzz.
Me. Cold and liquored up on something.
I’m not a fan of eggnog, but a nice Tom & Jerry on a cold winter night is sublime. Below is one recipe – for whatever reason, the drink isn’t popular around here and I don’t know why. It’s so ubiquitous up north that you can buy the “batter” in just about any store.
6 eggs 2 cups sugar 1 teaspoon ground cloves 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 teaspoon nutmegDirections: Separate eggs, beat whites until stiff, add sugar. Beat yolks until foamy. Fold together and add spices. Refrigerate until serving. To serve: fill mug with hot water. Add 1 1/2 tablespoons of mix per mug and 1 oz. liquor (brandy or rum).
Now folks in Milwaukee are also the biggest consumers of brandy in the nation, so anytime I had a T&J it was always made with brandy and not rum. The “not rum” part was important. I once got raging drunk on rum & cokes while eating popcorn and it wasn’t pretty. I didn’t drink or eat either for years.
In order to keep up with all that drinking, there’re a lot of bars in Milwaukee. In quiet, otherwise staid neighborhoods, there’s often a house on a corner where the owners have turned their living room into a bar. These little places were scattered all over the city and put the hop in bar hopping.
One time, on a bitterly cold night, my date and I popped into one to try and get the feeling back into our feet. I had a bad head cold and the barkeep, entranced with my southern accent, was determined to doctor me. He insisted I needed a hot buttered rum. I protested I didn’t drink rum. He insisted. I demurred. He sat one in front of me. I was new enough to the town that I hadn’t yet learned how to impose my will on strong-willed Germans. I couldn’t stand rum and the idea of putting butter in hot rum really turned my stomach. I decided to take a sip to be polite.
Hot damn, that was good stuff. It didn’t just involve rum and butter, but included spiced cider. Knowing my history with rum, I stopped at one and, later, convinced myself the head cold disguised the taste and under normal circumstances rum was not going to go down my throat without bringing up the contents of my stomach.
Years passed. Twenty-five or so of them. My boycott of rum continued.
A few years ago, I arrived in Massachusetts with a bad head cold. Between sniffles, coughs, achoos, chills and general unpleasantness, I told HMOKeefe the rum story. The next thing I knew there was a hot buttered rum in a large mug in my hands. I had several. – muchly much better than Nyquil and I slept all night.
We branched out to mulled cider, which near as I can figure is a more heavily spiced version of hot buttered rum minus the butter.
I’m a fan of mulled cider both with and without rum. The other night the first really cold snap of the year arrived and I pined for mulled cider. I couldn’t find fresh cider, but I did find an old bottle of cider in the pantry. I had a very fine rum on hand (Appleton Estates) and some old, half-stale mulling spices. I decided bad mulled cider was better than none.
I made way too much of the spiced cider and ended up freezing the leftovers in ice cube trays. This was genius! I can now have spiked spiced cider anytime I want. With the cold and rain of the past few days, I have enjoyed my less than stellar cider although freezing did much to improve it.
I'm fixin' to snuggle with Babette and read a novel.
I’m getting used to having a hot toddy in the evening. This weekend I may play around with hot chocolate and brandy (Schnapps is just hideous.) But right now, Babette and I have a date to curl up on the sofa and enjoy some quality time together. She’s one happy puppy these days and is no longer shy about demanding attention.
Monday Morning Gift
The elegant black of fresh paving.
It’s like Christmas!
Actually, this good news is going to make Christmas less stressful.
I’m so excited I could tap dance if I knew how.
The post office has repaved the parking lot.
Yes, indeedy, yee-haw and Snoopy dancing.
Getting into and out of the post office parking lot is a feat of derring-do that is responsible for my forehead crease becoming permanently deep. My derring-do isn’t daring enough as the adrenalin rush of surviving that parking lot is not the adrenalin rush of victory but that of a near-death experience.
I collect the mail for my place of employment. Five days a week I brave the demolition derby of the Veteran’s Boulevard Post Office. Contrary to stereotype, the folks that work there are downright nice and helpful, but before I can get to them, I have to brave the onslaught of the confused trying to negotiate what seems to me pretty straightforward travel lanes and parking lines.
There’s one old woman who I forgive most of her transgressions while simultaneously appalled that her driver’s license hasn’t been revoked. She’s not particularly short, but she’s so stooped she can’t sit up straight. Consequently, she appears to be one of those little old ladies who can’t see over the steering wheel. Come to think of it, she probably can’t see as she wears coke-bottle thick glasses and strains to read the printing on her mail.
She and I arrive about the same time of the morning. The days I’m behind her when she negotiates the right-hand turn into the parking lot closely followed by another right-hand turn into the handicapped accessible parking space are the days I want to bang my head on the dashboard. I want to do so not because I have no patience with her, but because sure as iceberg lettuce at a ladies luncheon, the person behind me will develop road rage.
Road Rager will, as soon as even an inch or so space opens up, drive around me only to slam on the brakes when learning, suddenly, that Daisy-in-need-of-a-Driver must back up and pull forward a half dozen times before she concludes she has the car properly parked.
While Daisy is negotiating the well-faded lines demarking the parking space, the demolition derby continues unabated in the remainder of the lot. Let me just a draw a picture so y’all can understand the problem.
OK, so I can't draw. Get over it.
If you study the photograph closely, you’ll see that lines, faded though they may be, demarcate a flippin’ nightmare of a traffic pattern. Under the best of circumstances, the parking lot is fraught with potential mayhem. Factor in lines that have faded to almost nothing, the impatience of the average American, and Miss Daisy trying to navigate around the jerks who are so special they needn’t park in an actual spot. (I always wonder if Miss Daisy glares at the jerks while the Road Rager is glaring at her.)
Further, after last winter, the lot had a fair number of potholes and crumbling macadam which provoke swerving and, otherwise, driving where it was not intended for folks to drive.
The drop boxes also provoke confusion. Folks don’t see, don’t read, or don’t care about the One-Way and Do-Not-Enter signs helpfully, but fruitlessly, provided at the entrance and exit to the Parking Lot from Hell. Daily, someone will pull in the out, pull up to the drop box, do all sorts of contortions to drop the mail into the box from the wrong side of the car, and then attempt to go out the in. If Miss Daisy is still trying to get her car into her parking space it can get ugly.
During the peak mailing days of the Christmas Season, all my Fa La La begins to channel The Grinch. April 15th is really a headache, because folk are well irritated before they even get to the post office. And for some reason, the back-to-school period of late August and early September is a busy time.
I always park as far away as I can thus protecting the car, but endangering my body as I try to traverse the distance without acquiring a need for traction.
My car has been hit 6 times in this parking lot – 5 of them while I was correctly parked and in the post office fraternizing with the hired help. I have been nearly run over more times than I can count as I tried to negotiate the derby while walking across the lot.
When I drove in this morning (two cars in front of Miss Daisy), the beauty of fresh black paving lit my soul from within and I fairly skipped to our post office box where I found Daisy working assiduously to get her key into her box. ‘Mornin’,” I said. She didn’t hear me, but I swear her back was a bit straighter and I’m convinced it was due to her happiness about the paving.
I went and talked to the clerks. I need to point out here that lines have not yet been painted on the new paving. I told them I wanted flashing red, LED lit lines, speed bumps, and concrete barriers. They told me that probably wasn’t going to happen. Still, I’m tickled at the mere possibility that a new traffic pattern could be in the works. Contrary to popular belief, it takes so little to make me happy.
A Cup of Coffee and a Pot of Shamrocks
A St. Patrick's Day Tradition
Way back when I was young and attractive, I was sitting in a bar, the kind of bar old newspapermen went to after the paper had gone to bed, trying to have a conversation with a girlfriend. This was not a pick up joint; nor was I of a mind to be picked up. As was not uncommon when I was young(er), some guy sidled over to the bar with an offer to buy drinks. It was soon apparent that it was me he was trying to pick up and no amount of “No, thanks, I’ll be doing good to get through this one” was going to deter him.
As we studiously tried to ignore him, he hit on the brilliant idea of giving me the earth shattering news that I looked “just like Cher.” Well, the resemblance had been marked on before so I was neither shocked nor flattered. (“Exactly like Cher” is a gross overstatement.)
Not giving up easily, the Cher comment was followed up with “So? You got some Indian in you?”
Well. As a matter of fact I do. On one side of the family, great-grandma was full Cherokee and on the other side there’s some Native American but we don’t know what flavor.
“Cherokee and what else?”
“Irish.” The other great-grandmother was full Irish. Now between the two great-grandmothers there’s a bunch of mutts and if I were to list my whole pedigree it would encompass all of the British Isles as well as goodly portions of Europe and a few of the Indian nations. I even have reason to believe I’ve got some African-American in me. I am nothing if not multicultural. Up until that time, I was apt to answer the question with “some Irish, some Indian, some English, some German and a bunch of other stuff.” But I was being terse with this young man in hopes that he would go away, so he got the one word answer. (I was too young at the time to realize you needn’t be polite with drunks in bars.)
After hearing his response, I now tell folks I’m Cherokee and Irish – I don’t give the full pedigree because his response was priceless. He said:
We Irish/Cherokee women are actually delicate little flowers.
“Cherokee and Irish? That’s a bad combination in a woman.”
And then he left.
After cogitating over the years on that statement, I believe that in certain situations he was right. In both the Cherokee and Irish traditions, women were apt to speak their minds and the menfolk were likely to listen, because if they didn’t there was going to be hell to pay. While I’m sure there are individual women who would make a liar out of me, in general, it’s still true that if you want a doormat for a wife you best not be fraternizing with the likes of us. Double the influence of generations of feisty women with two cultural traditions and, yes, that’s a bad combination.
I was relaying this story not too long ago to a friend and some guy who was not trying to pick anyone up piped in and said, “You’re not kidding. My ex-wife was Cherokee and Irish. You did it her way or you got out or she threw you out.” And then some other guy said, “Hey! You’re right. I never thought about it but my grandmother was Cherokee and Irish and, man, you didn’t mess with her.”
I don’t think I’m that bad – I’ll listen to reason.
In spite of my Irish heritage, I’ve never been much of one to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. Now it may be because great-grandmother was protestant Irish and they wear orange to celebrate William of Orange’s victory over King James II. She was also a teetotaler and I was in my 30s before I could have a drink without feeling like I had to hide it. Even then, I wouldn’t have let her see me with a drink in my hand.
Drinking is where the two traditions as they filtered through my family are at war with one another. The Cherokee side are hard-drinking, honky tonking, beer-bellied good old folks and the Irish side are alcohol-free church folk. (Go figure.)
One perfect bloom.
In any event, St. Paddy’s Day is not likely to find me in a bar swilling green beer. I do try and remember to wear green, but mostly so some juvenile won’t be provoked to pinch me. St. Paddy’s Day often finds me at home drinking coffee and admiring the Shamrocks I just bought. Every couple of years or so, I buy the shamrocks to replace the ones I’ve managed to kill with over-watering. I love Shamrocks. They’re such cheerful little things and if you take it easy on the watering they’ll live for years. If they are over-watered and succumb, St. Pat’s is the only time of year replacements can be found.
So. Happy St. Pat’s to you. Feel free to join me in a cup of coffee and a pot of shamrocks.
W. Va. Fur and Root 