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When the Lord gives you Lemons...
My Great-Aunt Pollyanna used to say: If all you have is lemons, make
lemonade.
My Uncle, Col. 'Catheter' Jack, would counter: If all you
have is a Hammer, the whole World looks like a nail.
Which is the
brand of family wisdom that I was relying on when I came to
woke up on Thursday to find the sky spitting out yet more April snow at
me. I was in such a lousy humor that I could have spit nails at whoever
walked by, hoping at the very least to knock a few hats off.
Call me
Despondent
And right about then, Joe Walsh came over the radio:
And
we don't need the ladies
Crying 'cuz the story's sad
'Cuz the Rocky
Mountain Way
Is better than the way we had
And that's when I told that impish bastard upstairs (I may be an Atheist,
but I know He's up there) that He should send me all the snow He
wanted to.
I wanted it to snow all day.
I wanted to leave work
empty handed with nary a ducat in hand.
I wanted to laugh in the face
of Global Warming with a quiver full of "Maine has 8 months of Winter
and 4 months of bad sledding" jokes.
I was gonna drink Rocky
Mountain Sneezers!
In April, Godammit!
The Rocky Mountain Sneezer is truly an obscure drink. It's a "one
off", and I only came across it the other day while rooting around
looking for shrubs. [If you're wondering if spring in Maine is
parsimonious to the point that one must actually go a-hunting
vegetation, you'd be just wide of the mark. It is, and you must,
but I was up to something else. Shrub is simply an old
colonial-era drink, sweetened with all sorts of things and then soured
up with (usually) vinegar.] I was flipping through Cedric Dickens'
(Charles Dickens' great-great-grandson), Drinking with Dickens
whence I happened upon the aforementioned tipple. It seems that while
Old Man Dickens was here in the States, he couldn't shake a rather
stubborn cold and cough combination. It became one of those intransigent
maladies that we all get from time-to-time, the ones that become so
familiar and a part of ourselves that the impulse to at least give it a
nickname is overwhelming. He dubbed his "The American Catarrh" and his
landlord often suggested a mixture he called the Rocky Mountain
Sneezer in the hopes of alleviating some of Dickens' suffering, and
we presume, some of his own. It's a simple little decoction, built along
the lines of the earliest of cocktail templates--spirits, sugar, water,
bitters--with a little bit of the Cobbler tossed in for good
measure.
And, of course, snow.
Shake together 2 oz. each
of Brandy and Rum with sugar and the juice of 1 lemon and a handful of
snow--preferably from the Rocky Mountains.
Add 2 dashes
Angostura.
It's a tasty pile of drink, I must say, particularly the 3rd when taken
in succession. But is it efficacious? Does it do the trick? Here's
Dickens:
"My cold refuses to stir an inch. It distresses me greatly at times, though it is always good enough to leave me for the needful two hours [during his scheduled public readings]. I have tried allopathy, homeopathy, cold things, warm things, sweet things, bitter things, stimulants, narcotics, all with the same result."
My results weren't much different, and I mostly concur with Dickens: while my catarrh is about the same, my Bahrain couldn't be more at ease.