Christmas morning. I came awake in the deepest part of the long night, craving a drink of Glenlivet Scotch. The first sip of Scotch whiskey always tastes like the view of a seaside mountain where red horses gallop right through a flock of white sheep, scattering them across a green pasture. The second sip of Scotch tastes like a tall wooden ship put to the sea in the early swells preceding a summer storm. The third sip makes you invincible and you can walk right across the ocean and see whatever the hell you want.
Gauging that I was something near four hours from sunrise, I realized that drinking might be a bad idea. My daughter, home from New York, would not be pleased to find me sprawled on my sofa with a tumbler in hand and invincibly spouting gibberish upon her waking in the morning.
Invincible people can be so obnoxious. They often make a pretty huge mess and, on occasion, invincible people have been known to burn toast.
Opting out of an early boozy start to the holiday, I climbed out of bed, fed the cats, and then flopped onto the sofa. Two of the cats soon joined me and, swishing our tails, we watched the blackened television screen. Pretty soon I started thinking…maybe, just before sunrise, if we each had only a single sip of Glenlivet, me and the cats…
Merry Christmas, dammit.
--Mitchell Hegman
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