Ganging aft agley

Dave went shopping the other day for a Mother’s Day feast. There’ll be no restaurant brunch for us this year, or most years. We rarely plan far enough ahead to get a reservation. This holiday is one where, ahead of time, I feel the pressure to conform to the typical moms-who-brunch mode: a lengthy gathering featuring midmorning cocktails, fancy breads, decorative fruits, and thinly sliced meats and cheese. Fancy and vaguely cosmopolitan. I suggested that Dave forage for croissants, chocolate-covered strawberries, macarons, deli meat, and Mimosas.

He came back with Lay’s chips, salsa, razorblades, chocolate chip cookies, frozen hamburgers, orange juice, and vodka. “Aargh,” he said, when I pointed out that OJ plus vodka equals screwdriver, not mimosa. Nothing’s wrong with a Screwdriver, though, we agreed.

I woke up this morning to a down-market reality, having slept the wrong way on my neck and with my ankle still not wanting to bend so that I could walk down stairs like a normal person. I felt much more in the mood for chips and a Screwdriver than croissants and a Mimosa.

Both Mimosas and Screwdrivers were born in the twentieth century. Ad men had successfully promoted orange juice as an essential breakfast item. A kind of vitamin-packed, cold version of coffee. And with the addition of OJ to the first meal of the day, day-drinking seems to have become more popular. Coincidence? Who knows? At any rate, common brunch drinks such as Mimosas, Bloody Marys, and Screwdrivers date to the 1920s and 30s and were quite the hit with the leisured and middle classes. In the early 1920s Malachy McGarry, the bartender at the London club Buck’s, invented a drink composed of two parts champagne to one part orange juice and called it a Buck’s Fizz. In 1925 a bartender at the Paris Ritz Hotel, Frank Meier, rejiggered the proportions of those ingredients to 50/50 and had his own hit. At some point, Meier’s drink was named after the similarly colored mimosa plant.

There are conflicting stories about the Screwdriver’s origins. No champagne for the U.S. Marines, stuck at sea for months on end, or the Americans working oil rigs in the Persian Gulf. The stories imply a more working-class beverage, no bartender required. Just tip a little vodka into the morning orange juice and stir it with the tools on hand (as legend has it, an actual screwdriver) and voila! a cocktail that energizes and relaxes in equal measure which can be consumed right under the boss’s nose! As someone who’s occasionally stirred a drink with a handy but inappropriate tool—in my case, a ballpoint pen—I can relate. Even the stories associating Screwdrivers with hotels have a déclassé feel. A 1949 article in Time Magazine depicts seedy diplomats enjoying these cocktails in the bar of the Istanbul Park Hotel. Far removed from Buck’s or the Ritz.

Dave’s haul also reflected some serendipitous screwups of the past. In 1930, innkeeper Ruth Graves Wakefield added semisweet chocolate shavings to her chocolate cookie dough after running out of baker’s chocolate. The result: the chocolate chip cookie. In 1853, after a finicky customer sent back his fried potatoes, saying they needed to be crispier, chef George Crum erupted. I’ll show him crispy! He cut a potato into thin paper-thin slices, fried them hard, then over-salted them. Aiming for inedible, he produced the incredible: the first potato chips.

Over the years I’ve come almost to prefer it when things don’t go exactly to plan. My plans are the size of my imagination; adding an obstacle stretches them in interesting ways. I’ve achieved nothing as globally significant as the accidents of penicillin, the microwave oven, X-rays, vulcanized rubber, the Margarita (a Manhattan bartender misremembered a cocktail recipe and using tequila instead of whiskey), or the ice cream cone (a waffle-seller helping out an ice cream vendor who’d run out of serving bowls at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair). On the other hand, my accidents haven’t been as terrible as tofu, either. Hooray for Screwdrivers, burgers, Lays’, chocolate chip cookies and other happy screw-ups.

Lilies: an attempt at acclimation

On Mothers Day and my birthday come the bouquets. I love flowers as presents. Nothing fancy, supermarket bunches are always welcome. If Dave asks for suggestions ahead of time, I always say flowers, a card, maybe something sweet, will be fine. But not lilies, please; I don’t like the smell. In times when Dave doesn’t ask, I find a way to mention the flowers I like, such as roses, a few days beforehand.

Frequently a lily or two shows up in a bouquet. Dave forgets that I don’t care for lilies, possibly in the same way that I can’t seem to remember the rules of cribbage, one of his favorite games. There’s only so much room in a mind. Not a big deal, a lily or two.

My Mothers Day 2020 bouquet was almost entirely lilies, white ones, plus a little baby’s breath and random greenery.  The arrangement was gorgeous. I found a place for it in the most ventilated, and easiest to avoid, part of our house: the dining room. (We eat there only for big holidays.) As lilies are toxic to cats, I put the vase on a shelf that Capone doesn’t usually climb on.

Lilies are hardy. Nearly a week in, the arrangement still looked lush and as fresh as it had on day one. The blossoms opened wider every morning. Dave brought the mail in on Thursday and said, “Boy, you can really smell those lilies.”

“You got that right,” I said, breathing through my mouth.

How can anything be as beautiful as a lily? The deep green of the leaves and stems. The gorgeous color shadings. The delicate filaments, dancers frozen mid-step. The petals, corridors leading into a fabulous temple. Every day they took over the room just a bit more, relaxing into the vase. Every day I stopped in to the dining room just to look at them.  All the while breathing through my mouth.

How can something so beautiful smell like fermented feet? Some people can train themselves to like things that they find yucky by repeated exposure. That hasn’t worked for me with yogurt, lima beans, or Stevie Nicks, but none of those things is so beautiful as a lily, so I made a serious effort. I stalked and sniffed, first from a distance, then moving as close as possible before lightheadedness took over. I made it to a distance of 18 inches, one day.  

Meanwhile I researched. It turns out that I’m not the only one who’s sensitive to lily scent, and there’s plenty of advice on what kind of lilies to buy (some varieties have very little scent) and even on a kind of surgery you can do on lily stems to fix the problem, which is far beyond my capabilities. The only way out for me seems to be to acclimatize somehow to the odor.

Maybe I will desensitize myself someday, but in regards to this bouquet Capone took matters into his own paws. He waited until we were watching and then jumped up to the shelf where he never goes and started nosing around the blooms. I grabbed 13 pounds of cat while Dave stuck the flowers into the waste bin.

Bad kitty, I told Capone, scratching him behind the ears, his favorite spot. He purred knowingly.