My mother had been searching the schnapps section for the last twenty minutes.
I slammed a few bottles of Vanilla Coke into the shopping cart. I hate Vanilla Coke, but it had only been out a week and I was determined to give it another chance.
“Careful!’” my mom snapped at me.
“Sorry.” I said, shifting the items around in the cart.
“What are those for?”
“To go with the Vanilla Stoli. I wonder if they’ll mix together okay. They should, they‘re both vanilla.”
“Oh.”
My explanation seemed to be enough, and she went back to browsing.
I noticed people watching us, but I didn’t really care. One can’t be much of a teetotaler in a liquor store. Or even better: a liquor SUPER store.

It was the first stop we made after dropping off my grandparents. My mom waved goodbye to them from our rental SUV and said with a crooked smile (in case they can read lips), “We need to get some liquor or else I’m going to kill them.”
Alcoholism doesn’t run in our family, but alcohol certainly runs in our veins. And this vacation promised the need to keep up properly anesthetized.
“Apple schnapps. Peppermint Schnapps. Orange…” my mom says as she reads every single label out loud, “Butter schnapps. They have butter?” She tugs at my arm wildly.
“What?”
“Have you ever heard of Butter Schnapps?”
I stare at the bottle for a moment, “I think that they mean butterscotch or something. Not like margarine.” We both agreed that would be gross and get back to searching.
“You find it yet?” she asks.
“Nope.”
My brother wanted us to bring back Lemonade Schnapps - he’s never seen it “anywhere but there.” Rather than sending out postcards or buying trinkets, our family brings back food and liquor. We’re very particular in this respect.
My father has a five year supply of his favorite salad dressing in their pantry at home. Every time someone from the Midwest comes to visit they’re taxed at least 2 bottles of Dorothy Lynch salad dressing if they want to stay for the week.
We continue to search for another fifteen minutes, and I can’t help but notice the strange bonding moment this has become: Mother and son buying hard liquor together. It’s somewhat validating I guess, to have your parent consult you on what the best mixer for diet coke would be , while keeping her parents from noticing it.

We give up the search for lemonade schnapps, mainly because we both are getting very thirsty. Our cart’s filled with all sorts of ridiculous fifths of alcohol - as if we’re never going to be able to buy them again anywhere else. Maybe it was a quiet omen that the rest of our trip will be wrought with the slow, grinding torture that only a weekend at the grandparents house can invoke.
On our way to the door I pillaged the shelf of ‘sample size’ liquor bottles. I grabbed an assortment of Vanilla Stoli’s and Captain Morgans mini-bottles.
“What do you need those for?” my mom asked.
“To pour in my slurpees‘. Instead of rum and coke, I‘ll have rum and coke slurpee.”
She stared at me for a moment, her eyes widening with excitement.
“Good idea.” she said, smiling.
So, we spent the next ten minutes buying miniature versions of all the bottles of booze we already had in our cart.

The rest of our vacation was spent making sly glances at each other as we’d distract grandma so that the other one could take a shot, or make a quick cocktail. We drank, we laughed.
We drank.
And then, as almost as soon as it began, our vacation came to a close. On the last day we sucked down the rest of our booze, and deposited the evidence in a nearby dumpster. Grandpa and Grandma waved goodbye, and we drifted off into the sobering skies, slightly hung over.
I look back on that ‘lost weekend’ fondly, but never in a million years will anything ever make me like Vanilla Coke.

[ 04.17.03 - addendum: my brother finally sound lemonade schnapps…at the liquor store just under a mile from his house. Go figure. ]

[originally posted 04/02 - archived to blog 10/05]