Great with Rhododendrons

Great with Rhododendrons

       By Douglas Parenti the Unremarkable

              “A poem is worth a thousand words.”

Lister Sinclair   
          

                        Einstein’s social philosophy: “Give them

                                    An inch and they’ll take a mile.”

People waste fifty years of their lives boozing. Or, they waste sixty-five and die. Or, they waste their best years boozing and then quit at about forty and feel glad they did, often becoming evangelists against drink. I never minded people drinking, and getting into terrible trouble doing so, until my own kids had the disease and then my involvement became intense. Now it is time to leave those fears behind and let the girl grow up, alcoholic or non, drunk or not, without career and purpose or with.

       My name is Martimer Spanish. I live at sixty-three Wessexfieldeaurop Drive. The trees here are splendid. Basswoods line the perimeter of my seven acres. Rabbits live in the hedges of the Hyena Shrubs and produce babies that I catch and cook. My freezer has venison tenderloin in it from my own back yard. Raccoon meat is savory and becomes nice and tender breaded with dandelion flour and marinated in gooseberry preserves. Across the yard, a quarter mile from my sunroom window, lies the creek where I bathe in summer in a shallows I had excavated by Hermann the Human Backhoe. He can dig a grave in an hour and a half. He charges three hundred and fifty dollars for the work. He’s rich. He told me that to buy a mechanical digger and keep it maintained would cost him more than he can make doing it by hand. Barbary shoots in the swamp willows near the west end by the creek taste of menthol candies, slightly, but not as strong as juniper berries taste ginny. A substitute for cod liver oil is the oils extracted from the bark of the Swedish Pine that I planted a row of down the eastern side of the yard back in the early sixties. They tower over everything now and I hear them clearly at night soughing in the wind, though they are a hundred yards distant. I have planted a few acres of grass fit for human consumption. It tastes slightly of baker’s yeast but it works marvels on the digestion. Prunes I dry myself from the plums that grow wild along the shore of Banjo Creek.

       And that reminds me. All musical culture is a waste of time and dangerous to the health of individuals. When I drank a great deal in my twenties, I listened to bluegrass music and it drove me to wish for more drink, not less. Give up music when you give up drink and your life will be happier for it. Rhododendrons are good for you, despite the official cautions that they poison the stomach. I have myself consumed many a plant of the Russian variety and survived. Taken with coffee and sweetened with a little raspberry syrup, those leaves taste a great deal like pancakes dipped in peach nutmeg. To drink with rhododendrons, I recommend, besides coffee, Vasavean Cocktail. It is a concoction of juices from wild plants that have all been named on the container, and is available at most health food outlets. I do not recognize most of the ingredient names. The only one I knew was the Pristinia Wart Shrub. I had no idea that it contained any liquid inside the shoots at all, dry and withered as the stems always appear. Nevertheless, the drink is fine with rhododendrons. It comes across with slow increase to the surprise of the palette and especially registers its most sticky claret flavors near the back of the mouth, sour and sweet both, like fine red cherries.