I once thought I was a child prodigy but I later learned Mozart began composing at five years old. At that age I wandered the woods with my dog, an insane golden retriever named Morgan, and pretended I was a knight, using a long stick as a sword. No genius, but a grade A smart ass. I was in the advanced classes in elementary school. They kept bumping me up and I had to hang with the older kids who were a bunch of real nerds and dorks, so I started throwing my tests on purpose so I could go back and chill with my real friends, the dummies, a make my return to first grade.

The older you become, the more the past becomes available. Vivid even. You spend years avoiding certain memories, good and bad, pushing them away only to have them come back stronger when you least expect it. The events you once thought mattered little, become cherished. Small orbs of realization you carry with you until the end.

This new cocktail, in essence, in specs, appears like just a plain old strawberry daiquiri. To me, it’s the closest thing to an alcoholic version of my grandmother’s fresh strawberry dessert with evaporated milk, sprinkled with sugar. Something she made for me when there was enough money kicking around. Perhaps a glimmer of the past, that cherished orb brought from the dark and turned into something palpable.

She lived in the entire top floor of a big two bedroom apartment on Cherry St. right next to the old Edward J. Costello courthouse on the side closest to the lake and to the east an abandoned lot which segued into a massive church no one seemed to ever go into. Across the street was the parking garage giving one access to the Burlington Square Mall. Through a few doors, down a hall, and you’d be right there in front of the mirrored doorways of Kay-Bee Toys and Hobbies. Any day I spent with my grandma began with breakfast at McDonald’s with either of her two best friends, a woman named Connie, or the meter maid, Star. Pancakes in styrofoam. Butter and syrup in those small, peel back plastic tubs.

She listened to Nat King Cole albums on an eight track and told me once my grandfather, when he was still alive, didn’t allow her to listen to them. He died when I was four. His presence always heavy in the air. The folded flag she kept in the corner. The lingering smell of his baked in pipe smoke. The tears I caught in her eyes every so often.

She taught me how to play poker and solitaire. “You’re grandpa used to bet himself money every time he played,” she said. Her everyday dialogue was sprinkled with old, now outdated idioms. “Two shakes of a lamb’s tail” was a favorite. She also used many strange expressions that still make no sense to me such as when I would ask when dinner would be ready and she replied, “I can’t get inside it.”

Old French songs were part of her repertoire which she hummed and sang to herself. The food she served me is the most vivid memory I have of those times. Spaghetti-Os with sliced hot dogs, toasted English muffins with butter, grilled cheese, lots of peanut butter and jelly, salisbury steak tv dinners we ate on trays while watching Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!

I only ever saw her drink around her sisters when they all got together. Canadian beer at my Aunt Laura’s house in a suburb outside Montreal. All five of them there, a bunch of old broads popping open Labatt Blue and Molson bottles, an occasional cap hitting the floor in the linoleum floored sun room.

Her old house on Cherry Street was torn down long ago. I still drive down that street when I go back home and look at the empty spot with a strange sense of loss before I head toward the lake and Battery Park. All of it gorgeous, barely any traffic at all. The breadth and sparkle of the water and the White Mountains behind it so normal to the people living there.

This new cocktail is deceptively simple. It reads on the menu like so: white rum, strawberry three ways, fresh lime. That’s it. Every ingredient in the drink is intended to bolster the flavor of strawberry. Banana liquor, guajillo, black pepper, and Thai tea in the punch, white cachaça, fresh strawberry, and white balsamic shrub for the final shake. The whey in the punch lends a creamy quality.

Child Prodigy

1 oz. Clarified Strawberry Punch

1 oz. White Rum

.5 oz. Fresh Lime Juice

.5 oz. White Cachaça

.25 oz. Fresh Strawberry Syrup

.125 oz. Aged Strawberry/Balsamic Shrub

Shake, double strain.