Road Notes: Sauk City, Wisconsin, Cows, and the Spirit of Robert Cummings

I love cows. Nothing as Zen as an hour-long drive by cows. Yummy cows. Milky cows. Chocolate cheese extra ice cream pemmican too please half-and-half cows, yummy cows.

Xmas Dinner #1. Most of the cows are out along the road, but quite a few indeed are simmering away in Kathy's kitchen crock pots. Mmm, mmm, steaks on feet with no more feet. And there's pigs and chickens and shrimps and it's a darn good thing for us that animals are smart enough to take no truck with all that rigamarole of worshipping Jesus or we'd be eating a whole big bunch of boring bread instead of feetless yummeat.

By 3:12 introductions have given way to conversations, conversations to appetite for much meat, meat reluctantly gives way to football, and then football surrenders its hold to hooch. And I mean HOOCH. I mean Grandad Cummings' vintage best Triple X served at its right-from-the-root-cellar coolest. The bloody marys had been great, as well as the vodka-7 slush, and the beers, and the wines, and the bottle of Awamori sake, sure, but it was Grandaddy C. who got my wink toward heaven this afternoon, not Tuscany, Italy or Golden, Colorado, not Siberia's most sullen distillery, not even the Shinto family on Okinawa that I'm pretty sure still chewed and spat their own rice, chestnuts, and millet into the fermenting tub to make such a splendid kuchikami no sake as I had today, and no, not even Krishna and his tasty tasty cows nor even that fellow Jesus that everyone seems to be on about got my glance this afternoon. As I lifted my glass and a wink to heaven it was for Grandaddy C.

Bring on the scarab-swarm of sugar-dosed children bashing about like a cigarette-stunted version of the Phliladephia Flyers of the 1970s, bring on the Q&A sessions coated in hairy eyeballs running themselves from my shaved head to beard to tattoos to piercings and back, bring on the decaying chivalry toward my east coast ancestry as the deluvian levels of liquors loosed most of this Saturday afternoon in this upper-Midwest baby-town of Sauk City (City? With a population of 3100? More like a moderately well-attended gathering) and turned the hours into a cross between an ad hoc presentation by French mimes of Lord of the Dance at the two-minute warning of a Superbowl at frosty Lambeau Field and playing a game of Twister with an infinite number of typewriters all trying to randomly create the word MONKEY with an infinite number of broken K keys (but you try explaining in vain that they could just do APE instead), bring even a snowstorm in bright sunshine such as I peer through right now, but please just please bring me another jigger or three of Grandaddy C's Finest Triple X first, yes, if you please.

Dedicated to Robert Cummings; Cheers, Old Sock, to you keeping the Earth and I'd guess most of Heaven lit like Christmas and I don't mean with lights.

permalink