skinny girls & mayonnaise

My dad was always pushing some drink or other at me as a kid. Less in the interest of corrupting me than fostering a strong cultural foundation, an appreciation of the better things life had to offer.

A father and his son. Mt. Rainier National Park. 1968

“Try this, it’s the finest dark roasted arabica coffee,” he would say. Or, “You’ll never taste a wine this good, my boy…” I developed tastes for both. But not Scotch. That was Dad’s drink. Scotch on the rocks. There was always a Glensomethingorother in his glass, it was always “the best Scotch you’ll ever taste,” and it always tasted the way rubbing alcohol smelled.

As I grew older, I also developed negative associations with Scotch — it was the drink he sometimes threw across the room when he was in a rage at my mother. And it was what my teenage friends and I turned to when we were alone in the house wanting a buzz, and there was nothing else available. For decades, I associated even just the smell with rage, headaches and vomit.

Today, a grown up, I mostly drink beer and wine. If I’m making Japanese food, I’ll drink saké, or make a fruity rum drink if I’m cooking Hawaiian. Like I told my father-in-law the other day, “I’m a theme guy.” I had over the years developed an appreciation for fine tequilas. I could actually taste the difference between anejo and reposada — and more impressively (to myself), between two anejos. I had come to enjoy the caramely complexity of the spirit. I was beginning to understand it in the same way I understood wine. Still, I typically only drank it when I was making Mexican food for dinner.

I never make Scottish food for dinner. But was it nonetheless time, if only out of nostalgia or simple deference to my roots, to give Scotch another chance?

I go out for lunch every couple weeks with my dad, now 87 and in fragile health. We usually go to the same place, a reasonably good Italian joint called Riviera. And always drink a bottle of wine with our lunch. A couple months ago, we got back to his house — the house where I grew up. I always experience a bittersweet feeling of longing and loss when I’m there — the place of my richest memories, and also the place I most wanted to get away from — more so now knowing that the time left is fleeting. My father offered me a glass of Scotch. Fifteen or so years ago, my uncle — my mother’s brother, who since passed an untimely death — bought me a Scotch at my little sister’s wedding. “You’ll like this,” he said matter of factly. And I did. So I accepted my father’s offer.

The Scotch was what I expected it to be — reminiscent of rage, headaches and vomit. Still, I could taste in the many layers unfolding on my tongue the intriguing possibility of rapprochement, that somewhere between my appreciation for fine tequila and my inescapable desire for the admiration of my father, I might actually develop a fondness for Scotch.

Fast forward a couple weeks.

Same lunch, same place. Back at my dad’s house, the 21-year-old Scotch, Glensomethingorother, emerges again. Again, I accept. The more I drink, the better it tastes, and the more sentimental I become. Like a moment suspended in amber, I am here — sitting across from my father, talking about life and death, in the house where I used to fall asleep in a guitar case in the sun, where my sisters and I played, where I ran home from school crying after my first fist-fight, where I first snuck a beer, where I dreamed of being the star left fielder of the Los Angeles Dodgers, where I emerged into the haze of a cigarette-smoke-choked living room the morning after my sister was killed, where I listened to Doors records and Smiths records stoned with my best friends, where I first spent the night with a girl. Where I said goodbye to my father, having finished both college and graduate school, moving out for the first and last time.

After a glass of Scotch and a lingering conversation, I hugged my dad and closed the front door behind me. Relieving myself beside the driveway, I stood beneath a sycamore tree with the most beautiful bark I’d ever seen. Then I noticed new leaves bursting from the buds. And I realized that this mighty tree had been a sapling my father had planted when I was a small boy. There used to be a towering eucalyptus tree across the street from our house, upon which we had a swing that when you rode out on it seemed to extend into the heavens, where now there is only an ugly, poorly constructed house abutting a tiny strip of the land that was once and always will be there. Time passes, things change. And in my memory those childhood images take on the patina of an old photograph. A boy swinging toward heaven on a rope swing, the eternal smile of childhood etched on his face.

Leaving my dad’s house to pick up my own son from school, never knowing if it’s for the last time, I noticed on that tiny strip of land where the immortal eucalyptus tree used to, someone had planted a maple tree. Dad, I think I may finally be beginning to understand Scotch.

As my late friend Dann used to say, “And so it goes…”