I miss my real father, I miss my priest Father Ralston, and I miss the men who have been like fathers to me. It’s no surprise that I rekindled memories of my three favorites, now all deceased, during my solo Covid days. I invited them into my life by incorporating their ritualized activities. Each father figure finished his workday with a cocktail and music. I renewed strength during my own cocktail hour (which does not necessarily last for one hour nor always include alcohol) by remembering their stories, wisdom and love.

I played their music and made their favorite cocktails; that’s how I brought the personalities of the men I love most into my quarantine. To riff on a friend’s pronouncement that “there is whiskey season and there is wine season,” to me there are male and female cocktail hours. My associations with manly cocktails are all about the hard stuff. To celebrate Fathers Day, I invite you to make yourself a drink and let me tell me you what the three wise men taught me.

My cocktail education began in Africa, watching my father, the spy. After work my dad made a drink, played music and read a book. He relaxed. His drink was scotch, his music chosen from his collection of thousands of LP’s or reel to reel tapes. His cocktail music was Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Dave Brubeck...all classic cool cats. (Plus jazz must have been a way to connect to his country's culture while living in a different continent, at least while he drank his drink.) His reading material: philosophy, mathematics, Dante, or Scientific American magazine...nothing light for him. While he drank his scotch I learned from him how to listen, how to fit in anywhere, how to make people comfortable and the art of elegance. He didn’t do this on purpose or by design, but simply by being himself.

Years later, in Savannah, Georgia, at Father Ralston's house (which was the rectory of St. John's Church where General Sherman lived for three months during the Civil War), I would watch him pour a few shots of Old Weller into antique sterling julep cups, sometimes with shaved ice, others neat. His small living room was dwarfed by a huge Yamaha piano and his passions were broad: opera, history, philosophy, silver, baseball. He transported me out of the present into the past like only the most gifted teacher can do. What I learned from the priest was belief in myself, that I was intelligent. When I told him that my Entertaining for Dummies was only a book for dummies, he replied that "no dummy could write a dummy's book." Father Ralston taught me to me hear Maria Callas's high C, appreciate Dante's entire trilogy (not just The Inferno) and fall in love with bourbon.

The third father figure, a cognac drinker, was an extremely accomplished gentleman sitting at the top of huge organizations. He said part of his success was focusing on the small moments, honoring his small daily or weekly accomplishments, which together added up to the big things. He celebrated the little victories by sipping cognac or eating a cookie, which seemed adorable, like the little kid in us all. His ritual honored daily moments of pride, felt internally, before major achievements happened. He was a business mentor to my entrepreneurial self. The lessons he wanted me to learn were to honor myself, not to wait or need other people's accolades, and to always believe something big was around the corner.

My curiosity got these men to open up and share what life taught them and this Fathers Day, I thank them all. They were solid rocks on which I leaned, and now serve with a strong drink!