Cocktail of the Week -- Father's Day Edition



Father's Day is one of those second-rank, maybe even third-rank holidays. Christmas, New Year's, Valentine's, Mother's Day -- those are the Big Four. Thanksgiving, much to my chagrin, has been pushed out of the top tier -- mostly by the commercial heathens who run big department stores and malls. They don't like Thanksgiving, because there's nothing to buy. Instead, we go from Halloween (a "holiday" I never liked) to Christmas.

Thanksgiving is now on the second holiday level, slightly above Easter, Satanween and the Drinking Days: St. Patty's, Fourth of July and Cinco de Mayo. Down in the third tier, we find Memorial Day (bastardized into a long beach weekend), Labor Day (the last summer fling). And then there's Father's Day. (For the record, the fourth tier consists of King Day, Veterans Day and Presidents Day, for which a lot of people don't even get off work.)

Poor dads. They never get much credit, and they get all the blame. On this day before, I lift my glass to the men who somehow made love to a woman (kidding!), produced a child and then raised that little bundle of joy to not be a brat.

So let's find the perfect cocktail with which to toast: The Big Daddy.

Ingredients

1 1/2 oz. vodka
Chilled bottled water
Twist of lime peel
Ice cubes

Instructions

Pour the vodka over ice in a highball glass. Rub the insides of the lime peel together and toss in. Fill with the water and stir.

Simply and strong, just like dead ol' dad.

My favorite fatherly reflection comes from an Atlantic Monthly article by Mark Twain called "Old Times on the Mississippi." In it, Twain wrote: "When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years."

To read the tribute to my dad, see last year's Father's Day entry.

Cheers, Pop!