A Whisky and Milk, Please

The bar was full with dozens of rowdy men standing impatiently in front of the counter. It was Friday afternoon at 6, the unwinding hour for many of these hard-working men who came in to celebrate the end of the workweek and the start of the weekend. I waited my turn and shuffled forward slowly until I was at the counter. The barman looked at me and said, “What’ll it be young feller?”

“A scotch whisky please, White Label if you have it.”

“We do!” He reached for the bottle, poured the tot and said, “Anything to go with this?”

“Milk, please.” Did I imagine it or did the huge room suddenly go very quiet?

“What was that? You want milk with your whisky?” Why did he say it so loudly?

“Yes please. The room wasn’t quiet. It was soundless.

“Say when,” he said as he carefully poured milk from a quart bottle into the glass. I watched the gold of the whisky change to a dull beige. The bar erupted in laughter. 

It was in 1949 that I became my grandfather’s driver. I was 16, too young to have a driver’s license but no one seemed to mind. Grandfather was then about 75 years old, a little wavery in his manner and peering at the world through thick lenses and watery blue eyes. He probably had class 7 cataracts. And he probably drove by memory. He was very hesitant behind the wheel of his Dodge Fluid Drive. He bought the latest Dodge Fluid Drive model every year, always in Sky Blue. Pop was about five-four in his socks and when he was behind the wheel of the Dodge you couldn’t see him unless you peered over the sill, a frightening moment until you realized there was a driver after all. His three daughters and their husbands, after a long debate while watching him drive off one morning, decided his driving days were over and I, the oldest grandson, was elected to the job.

My day went like this: In the morning I would catch a bus from where I lived with my parents to grandfather’s house in the suburbs. I would get a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice while he slowly ate his breakfast. Pop was a strict follower of Bernarr Macfadden, the health nut who had produced a health magazine in 1899. Macfadden practiced an exercise routine that included exercises with dumbbells and a horizontal bar, followed by a daily six-mile walk carrying a weight.

Grandpa, a devoted disciple of Macfadden, was up at 6 every morning and spent an hour sunbathing in the nude. He would lean back on the garden steps with canvas screens on both sides to block the neighbors’ view, and sit facing East. He turned from time to time giving all areas of his body their chance in the sun. 

Pop’s day started with two glasses of very hot, but not quite boiling water. Breakfast consisted of a glass of carrot juice, a bowl of oatmeal porridge sprinkled with iron dust and fortified with vitamin drops, followed by a cup of tea and a handful of pills.

When he was ready I would reverse the car out of the garage into the traffic and drive him to his office downtown. He was still the president of the manufacturing company he had founded in his thirties. No longer very active, he couldn’t break his lifetime routine of sitting behind his desk all day. I would leave him at the building entrance and park the car in the lot nearby. From there I walked a couple of blocks and caught a bus to the engineering college where I would spend the day. I would go back to his office at about five and drive him home. And that’s where my whisky-drinking sessions started.

He always invited me to come in and have a drink before I caught the bus home. He drank White Label scotch and he drank it neat. “I would offer you a drink too, Jeremy, but its powerful stuff. How old are you? Sixteen?  I’ll get myself into trouble if I get caught misleading a teenager. Well, all right. You have to learn sometime. But you have to drink yours with milk.” So every evening, sometime between five-thirty and six, depending on the traffic, I drank a whisky and milk. It took a bit of getting used to before I began to enjoy it. The months passed and we graduated to drinking seconds or doubles. I would then stagger off to the bus stop and go home.

This arrangement went on for the five years that I spent at college. Then Pop’s health declined and he no longer went into the office. To my disappointment my driving duties came to an end. I missed him and the close friendship that had developed between us. I made a point of calling on him regularly and whenever I did, we drank whisky together. Mine always came with milk.

I never drank whisky anywhere else. I was a college student and we drank beer. Pop passed on in 1959 and I stopped going to the house. I was by then a qualified engineer with my own small practice and making a modest living. My drinking was confined to a beer here and there and occasionally two beers with a colleague or a client. As the years passed, I have graduated to drinking whisky with a couple of cubes of ice and a drop of water,

or if it’s a single malt, I drink it neat.

It was on the third anniversary of grandpa’s death on April 1st, that I made a promise to myself that I would celebrate his memory regularly. He had left an indelible mark on my personality and on my lifestyle and I missed his wisdom and views of the world.

These days, once a year on the anniversary of Pop’s passing, the first day of spring, I order a double whisky and milk. I raise the glass high, recite a short message to the man I loved and smile at the shouts of laughter around me.