The Great Egg Nog Incident

Fall, into winter, as the desert goes to sleep. The temperature drops with the sun as it settles into a lower orbit and casts its light across the long horizon of the great desert basin, euphemistically known as the grand valley. Shadows stretch and blur, a bluish tint makes the view across the horizon slightly surreal, like someone had put a menthol filter on the sun. It wasn’t bright, but it wasn’t dull, it was just before the equinox and like every year at this time, my parents were busy with holiday plans.

Well, I should say my mother was busy with holiday plans while my father, steady as a great ship at sea, went to his desk downtown, returned in the dark and upon entering the house gave my mother a peck, on the back of her neck, and asked if she would like a drink. “I’ll make manhattans”, he said in his seasonally adjusted manner and moved toward the kitchen. My mother, not a big fan of that particular cocktail would say “sure, but make mine a chardonnay, please”. He would look down at the two glasses, filled with ice, silently empty one of them of its unwanted cubes and start again, reaching for a wine glass. He didn’t smile, he didn’t complain, not on the outside anyway, he just started again with an insignificant change in amplitude of emotion and stirred.

The house was small, with little definition between living room, dining room and kitchen, ranch style. It was a collection of spaces filled with different furniture, or appliances, and that’s how you knew which room you were in. An avocado green shag carpet covered up what was later discovered, long after they’d died and left the house, a beautiful pine-wood floor. A stereo “hi-fi” with a record player buried in the cabinetry and an amplifier hidden and inaccessible, was stationed by the front door. It multi-functioned as a coat rack, a book shelf, a glass holder, and mail receptacle. A collection of ash trays adorned the other furniture surfaces, just in case a cigarette needed to repose itself while in transit from one end of the room to the other, a variety of Zippo lighters handed down from the previous generation gave it the nick-nack touch it needed to round out the eclectic decor. Sparse, but each piece had a story and a place that gave it a still-life feel in my memory. It was lived in.

Near the fireplace, which was never used, a large upholstered chair with arms that fit my father as if a tailor had made it for him to slip into every night. A floral couch (no relation to the chair) by the wall, looked out through a large bay window covered by a striped awning onto the street, which rarely had traffic. The abbreviated view was of a small shaded yard with large trees including an immense cottonwood about 100 years old, two locust trees, which hung their branches so low it blocked the sight of the house across the street and a crab-apple which dropped fruit and leaves on the lawn for birds of all kinds to eat. My mother would sit on the couch with her wine, looking at the yard, while my father would read the paper, or a book under a floor lamp that seemed to have grown out of the green shag. Sometimes, a television was on. My father smoked his Camels, sipped his manhattan, and read and relaxed as the liquor eased across his brow and the paper slowly lowered as his thoughts lead him somewhere else.

It was about that time of the year, and my mother waited on the couch wondering when he would say it. “Isn’t it time for egg nog?”, he asked mysteriously. It was a rhythm they followed for decades, until the beat stopped, when the house was almost empty, and only my mother, alone, looking out the bay window, would say to herself, “isn’t it about time for egg nog?”, to no one but herself, and she would smile. She nodded. Memories flowed through her like a manhatten, easing her brow, as she stroked an old dog at her feet.

“We could make our rounds next weekend, just before all the college kids starting coming home. I know the Browns, and the Littles, and Rob and Marge will be home, and maybe the Pennocks too.” he said. These were some of their best friends that my parents had made from their time in the small mining town of Uravan nearly 25 years before. All the men had worked for the same company and continued to do so, each had been promoted and moved up to the grand valley offices, and their lives paralleled each others, whisking along the middle class american-dreamway, with kids in tow. They were all World War II vets, including the women, who shared similar histories. The families shared the desert and it’s hot, arid summers and its cold, breathless winters with little snow in the valley, but enough to call it the egg nog season.

My mother reacted to his suggestion with disingenuous surprise, partly to make him feel like it was a wonderfully spontaneous idea, and partly because it always seemed to sneak up on her, and yes, of course it’s that time of year, she would reply.

“What a wonderful idea, dear.” she would say. Reliably, and kindly.

A wry smile smeared itself on both their faces and the rhythm of the season settled into its groove. She said she would get the perishable ingredients at the store the next day if he would agree to pick up the combustibles at the liquor store. He would agree. And then he would walk over to the “hi-fi”, eyeing the ash tray that begged for his dangling cigarette, after moving a few books and an dog leash (“what’s that doing here?”) and he would begin to thread a record onto it’s metal post and to slide down onto the turn table, to play something like the nutcracker suite, or if my mother got to him before he’d dropped the needle, she would instead suggest “perhaps Dave Brubeck, or Oscar Peterson, maybe Duke Ellington’s interpretation of the nutcracker, just not Tchaikovsky. You know he was a manic depressive?” she reported, not for the first time.

Such was her power of suggestion. He thought of the two cocktail glasses filled with ice, he was emptying one of them in his mind, as he silently stirred, and swapped out the record, choosing Art Tatum instead. Such was the level of his defiance.

The simple scene became serene and time took on a look that made the ash trays twinkle. A small Christmas tree, mounted on a table, with a few gifts wrapped in colorful foil became the focus of the unspoken conversation in the room. It was officially egg-nog season, and Thelonious Monk was in the queue.

The next day, with their respective assignments in hand, my parents went their separate ways to harvest and gather. The recipe required lots of eggs, and cream and milk and all the things you would expect to make it eggy and noggy, but if you’ve never made egg nog this is the famous, highly sought after, and revered family recipe that’s been handed down at least 3 generations and began somewhere on the border of Austria and Poland (when Poland and Austria shared a border).

It goes like this: 1 Dozen Eggs (Separate eggs and beat whites until stiff. Beat yolks. Fold whites into yolks.)

1 Quart half and half. (add cream and milk and stir well – don’t beat them, ‘they’re fragile’, someone had added, something my grandmother might write, I suspected.

1 Pint heavy cream.

1 Pint light cream.

1/2 Gallon Milk, whole or, 2%. (my father had written a note on the original recipe, in his distinctive, 19th century-like cursive, the yellowed paper it was written on added more authority to an already heavy concoction, so when I later made the potion myself for my own family, it was no longer an option, but a revision to the recipe that had clearly stood the test of time, and the modifications made by my father, and others before him. They had transcended mere revision and were now, rather an evolution of the brew and, an invitation, of sorts, to consider my own editions). But I digress.

His note: “I cut the milk part down by 50%; didn’t want to dilute the good stuff too much, also, Pat says to beat the sugar into the egg yolks for better results.” I later found that both suggestions made the nog thicker, richer, and not quite, but very close to rendering it ‘over the top’. It stops just short of that. Unless, of course, you’re counting calories, in which case it was well over the top, so far over the top that it went straight to your bottom. But I digress. Again.

All right, now for the business part of the recipe: 1 fifth rum, plus 1 fifth brandy, plus 12 oz. bourbon or whiskey, plus 2 1/2 cups of granulated sugar. And, finally, nutmeg (“optional”). Personal note: I have viewed recipes as suggestions, or guard rails for the experiment, but this amalgam had taken on its own life and its history and basic formula had become sacrosanct, so I’ve been reluctant to wade into the deeper waters, where my forefathers and foremothers swam. Since they’re passing, of both themselves as well as the recipe, onto the next generation, my older brothers and I have forgone the optional nut meg. At least the “desert” nut meg variety. But we know it’s history and its role in the great egg nog incident.

The last part of the recipe follows as another instructional notation from my father: ‘Ladle the nog into glass jars for storage. Keep a week to 10 days in the refrigerator. Shake well before serving and sprinkle nutmeg on top for those who like it.“

As a high school girl, I recall seeing the battery of Mason jars lined up on the top shelf like soldiers ready for battle, shouldering their vitreous forms to crowd out the milk and leftovers, cottage cheese and other pedestrian consumables that normally occupied the space during the 10 day cure. Hand written names on festive tags identified each soldier’s destination and they jostled for attention whenever the door was opened. In their beautiful creamy yellow uniforms they were indeed, seductive, as well as taboo, which, by-the-way was a combination of traits I found to be my guiding tenets of behavior through-out my high school career.

During the interim, while the mixture fermented in the fridge, my parents had firmed up arrangements with their friends. Normally it was multiple stops for them, but the group had decided that the tradition deserved a collective and ‘spontaneous’ (spontaneity is best when practiced) gathering so all four couples had chosen to meet at the Browns, who had the largest of all the small houses among them. Basically, they had three couches so everyone had a seat and they also had a colored television, in case there was a Penn State game on. My mother wore her blue and white sweater with a fraternity pin that my father had given her, stuck to the lapel, near her heart. She only wore the outfit if the Nittany Lions were scheduled to play.

It was Game day and my parents were boxing the bottled egg-nogs and readying themselves for the afternoon meet-up with their friends. As a side note, both my parents were pretty shy, conservative, and buttoned up, and they had lived their lives accordingly and as a model for their children. As all of their friends had also done, just like the rest of the country and it’s generation of WWII vets. As the youngest, and the only girl, and my father’s favorite, I benefited from a lot more leeway than my older brothers, but the parents were still pretty reserved. Time had managed to beat a little bit of their stiffness out of them, like the eggs in the nog, but they would break before they bent too far.

Around 4:00 pm they put the finishing touches on the gifts they were bringing and hurriedly went to the car and without a goodbye, left for the Browns. It was only 15 minutes away and it was about that time that my father called me and asked that I bring down the nutmeg he’d left on the counter. I had just gotten my drivers license so any excuse to drive was a welcome opportunity, and coming from my father, a surprising request. I found the spice in a cloth bag labeled Chi’id’s desert spice, and in quotations, ‘nutmeg’. I thought it was a misspelling of dessert, but later learned that no, desert was the correct version of the word. My father told me to take my time and drive carefully but to hurry, if you could. It was the kind of mixed message parents often give their children and later, when I had my own, I found I repeated the process as often as they had.

When I got to the Browns, they were standing around the living room waiting for one of the other couples to arrive and hardly noticed my delivery, although polite and always courteous, the ‘adults’ dismissed me with a “drive back safely” message and off I went.

The rest of the story is second-hand, mostly from my mother who revealed more details as she got older and after my father had passed away. After my mother died, I believe I had learned much, although I think not all of the story, and here is what I was told over time.

The couples knew each other well and liked the ceremony and pomp of the holidays, so they waited for the Pennocks to walk through the door before passing out the precious egg nog. My mother says they were all standing in the kitchen and my father, only because he was so proud of his concoction made a small speech about the tradition the eight of them had made with each other and that this particular nog lot, he thought, was their best effort to date. And to further the experience, he introduced the special nutmeg which he said was given to him by his friend Chi’id, an old Navajo man he’d met in his field days in Uravan. He told the story of how he’d saved Chi’id’s life out of pure (albeit somewhat mysterious) circumstances when he was still doing geology in the Uncompaghre and Unaweep wilderness. His colleagues and their wives, even my mother, had never heard the story of Chi’id as she unconsciously twiddled with the turquoise bracelet she often wore when going out.

My father spun the story as he poured out the thick, rich yellow liquid and asked each of his friends if they wanted nutmeg. Most, but not all of them, said of course, particularly with such a compelling story behind it. Seasonal toasts were made as they listened to my father tell about how he had found the injured and dehydrated Navajo man in the most remote possible place of the Escalante desert. He wasn’t typically a loquacious person, so the fact that he was telling them all about his unusual experience was, in itself , a very unusual behavior for him. But stranger yet, it became.

It wasn’t just the egg nog, because there were other drinks as well and they had all had some, but the fact that my parents had turned this into a ritual made the thick rich mixture the center piece of their ceremony which began with a clink, and a nod. As my father continued to tell the tale of his desert find, the double decker vista train that rolled through the great valley every day filled the winter air with its romantic “I’m going somewhere” sound and the melancholy horn of the California Zephyr swelled in every ear and sent each on their own mystical journey as the spice took effect almost immediately upon consumption.

Please don’t misunderstand, this was a mickey for everyone, certainly my father didn’t know the nutmeg was a hallucinogenic mixture of peyote, mescaline and who knows what else, harvested from the deep desert of the San Miguel canyons and kept in a drawer of my mother’s kitchen for nearly 20 years, but that’s exactly what it was.

The Undiscovered Country (from whose bourne no traveler returns)

All my life, my father had refrained from telling us about his “war years”. When we were kids, my grandmother had told me and my brothers about his ‘not being able to sleep well’ after he returned from his two years in the South Pacific’ and we were instructed to simply let him sleep when he could. …..”And don’t wake him if we found him nodding off, or napping”.

She said he had “battle fatigue” and it made him bolt upright, sweaty and blanched, like a potato in a boiling pot, and he wasn’t able to locate himself for a minute or two with his wild blue eyes spinning inside the sockets like indigo marbles in a glass of milk. And he never explained, not a word, all his life, bottled inside and silent as an abandoned church. That’s just the way it was, and the generation of silent sufferers kept it all locked inside, demons and all. My father wasn’t the only one, he was just the only one we knew.

The eggnog slid down his throat and the psychotropics introduced themselves to his bloodstream. He looked out on the perfect Pacific ocean as it lapped at his bare feet. He was eighteen, barely. He wore his navy issued khakis, but shoeless and shirtless he watched the sky, and he wondered how had the world gotten to this point, and where was this point in the world, anyway? Tropical breeze, waves, he tasted the ocean.

He was getting sunburned and he could feel his skin radiate. Somewhere along the horizon, a faceless, nameless enemy stared back at him from an undisturbed sea. There were other young men on the beach, a few of them were throwing a football, some were sleeping, while others talked about themselves and where they’d come from, some loudly, others listening and laughing with cigarettes dangling and dancing from their lips. My father watched as the scene unfolded, like a spectator in a movie that featured himself, the camera was in his head. He could feel the tropical air around him, smell the breeze and heard the sounds of the young sailors around him with accents from across the country and he watched as the sky went tangerine behind the setting sun. They were here, in this small island surrounded by grey ships of varying size and dimensions, destroyers, an aircraft carrier, battle ships, escorts, baking in the harbor, bubbling with anxiety and filled with lethal and deadly intentions, and bristling with youthful testosterone counter balanced with the nearly paralyzing effects of adrenaline. A wicked war cocktail from whence they all drank.

Mr. Brown stood up to get a glass of water, the others merely observed from where ever they were on the couch…..

My father was on the deck of the flag ship that he was attached to, and saw his first Japanese squadron formation fly across the horizon, menacing and frightful with death on every wing and all the young men around him pointing and yelling to the ship’s bridge that there was action heading toward them. Rising into the sun, they were nearly impossible to see, but it was clear enough that they were coming and full of malcontent.

The speed of the boat made every sailors hair whip across their pate as if a micro storm was located immediately above the top of their heads, making them look even more like boys, than men. Seawater misted them as the rhythm of war swirled around the deck. My father stood next to the commanding officer awaiting instructions, he was a signal man, it turns out. Color blind, he had to learn and memorize every pattern without benefit of the full pleochroic spectrum, but it had somehow served him well in that he was assigned to the command ship and to the commander of the fleet for intra-ship communications.

He never volunteered that he had that condition, of being color blind, but later it was suspected and then confirmed, when he recognized enemy positions on a map where all the others saw only trees. The camouflage used to hide enemy assets were clear and obvious to my father, which was a trait and skill only other color-blinded sailors could see, and even more uniquely, only those with green-red spectral limitations. His ability to see patterns, as opposed to color, meant he would be on-deck throughout the action, and as such, the sound and fury fell all around him as he flashed and shuttered the metal louvres which translated to visual messages across the broken ocean to other grey ships.

The first squadron of zeros came in low along the horizon and blinded the battery operators until the planes were nearly overhead – too close for any of the bigger guns and the first fly-over dropped munitions on the deck of 3 of the 18 ships and they immediately burst into flame. Some of the officers fired their hand guns at the menacing machines, chaos and cacophony spread across the bridge. My father’s ship was hit by schrapnel, apparently a dud bomb. Metal screaming across the deck like lightning in a can, with a piercing sound that preempted its final stop, like a thousand pound hockey puck hitting the rink wall. No one was hit, except the man, the officer standing next to him, the one who was in charge of communications, caught a big piece of steel that cleaved his forehead. He collapsed at my father’s feet, and sputtered out. His hat flew off the side of ship flipping over the side, like a falling leaf, he watched it sail away.

My father didn’t know the man, he knew that he was older, an officer in charge, and just like his own father who was serving at exactly that same time in the same role, on another ship in the same sea under the same attack and he couldn’t help but see the correlation. They had always had a constrained relationship, each judging the other from near and far, and never able to forgive or understand the other, probably because they didn’t talk to each other, but with the dead man’s head at his feet my father looked into the eyes of his own father, and fell to his knees.

From the couch, my father winced and turned sideways, clenching his fists and eyelids as he relived the trauma of that moment. He saw the pieces of himself he’d left there on the destroyer, the innocence, his youthful exuberance and optimism, a friendly outlook on the world, shattered there on the deck next to a man’s brains and face. He recognized himself as an 18 year old away from his home in western Pennsylvania for the first time in his life. He’d never seen death, violent or otherwise, before. He really hadn’t seen much up to that point, only a few months before, he was in high school and now he was on a seaborn battle field. Like most of the sailors around him, he leaped into manhood the best he could. As he looked across the span of time between then and now he recognized that that was the time and place where he had lost his youth. There, in the living room, 30 years later, he could more clearly see himself, and perhaps understood why he was variably torpefied and at other times, apoplectic, as he navigated his way through life. It was as if he had found the plug that had been disconnected on that ship, so he reached down and put it back into the socket.

Like many young soldiers and sailors, you never know how you’re going to respond when it happens to you and the impact is as unpredictable as a role of the dice. Some seemed to handle the situation heroically in the moment but later realize, like my father, that he’d left pieces behind, on the deck of a ship, in the middle of the Pacific, which was at that time anything but, and found himself filled with emotions he’d never resolved. He’d left some friends, young men who were much like himself, from small towns and families from across the country, with lives as big as the ocean they looked out on, snuffed, unceremoniously. It took him a long time to look again, and to see how they’d come and gone in the wink of a young man’s eye.

He saw how he’d never fully embraced his children, particularly his sons, and especially as they approached the age of service. He’d turned himself inside out trying to understand what they would go through and how it had changed him so much that he forgotten what it was like to be young and carefree. But now he remembered and a flood of warmth and empathy washed across him, like a zephyr, and he rejoined himself on a beach in the south Pacific and looked out on an unbroken sea, waves lapping at his feet. Shirtless, he could feel his skin burning under the hot sun.

We learned over the course of time, that he had spent nearly 19 months in the navy, ironically, as a specialist signal man, able to communicate across oceanic spaces to people he’d never met, or would meet, but unable to talk to himself, and others in his immediate friends and family because of what he’d bottled up that first day on deck of a great, grey destroyer.

A few weeks later both of my older brothers came home for the holidays and I remember his standing at the door to greet each of them. He’d never done that before. When they walked up to the porch he reached out and hugged them both, and separately. He smiled broadly and marveled at their crisp young faces like he was seeing them for the first time. My mother and I had already been the beneficiary of this new behavior immediately after the great egg nog incident, and so I watched from a younger sibling’s distance to see how each of my brother’s responded. Both looked at each other, and at us, and at their father and saw a man they’d never seen before, a man at peace with himself and with them and with everything around himself. Moments never last long, but that moment will live in my memory for the rest of my life. It was as if my father met my brothers where they were in their lives, and was able to reclaim that time for himself as well. He was able to watch our lives unfold before him and he saw each of us without rancor or prejudice, recognizing perhaps that living and life was for all of us, an ongoing experiment with often unpredictable outcomes and side effects. He saw himself differently as well, still not able to talk about the experiences but willing to acknowledge its effects and contextualize it for the life he’d lived, and futhermore, to extend and apply the lessons to his children, as well.

For the rest of his life, he seemed kinder, more patient, more understanding and laughed freely at our sojourns and forrays, failures and successes, sorrows and joys, he was, to me, a man at peace with himself.

My brothers and I sometimes laugh about how he had found himself in the bottom of a glass of spiked egg nog and I think to myself, secretly, I wonder where that nutmeg went.