mother’s day

SALTY SCOT—Wee heavy for a wee bear…or not

My Fellow Inebriates,

I totally forgot about Mother’s Day, which perhaps explains why my mother totally forgot to invite me when they opened a bottle of Parallel 49 SALTY SCOT SCOTCH ALE. If you can trust her tasting notes, it was a heavy, wintry ale with lashings of caramel—a malt bomb packing 7.5% ABV under a finger of fizzy, off-white foam. It developed, she said, as it warmed, coffee and brown sugar coming to the fore, adhering nicely to the palate in a boozy, friendly, wintry, not-quite-Mother’s-Day fashion.

salty_scot_bottles

Why did she not invite me? I’m thinking…maybe she doesn’t equate me with the other kids. You know, the little human girls…Yeah.

And another thing…every so often I notice that my mother isn’t a bear. I mean, she can get ugly like a bear, but ultimately her chromosome count’s off. Not a bear.

And if she couldn’t find it in her heart to invite me for some SALTY SCOT, well, would she do what this mama bear’s doing for her little cub on the highway?

I WOULD SETTLE FOR SOME SALTY SCOT!!!

Do liquorstore bears have mothers?

I don’t have any pre–liquor store memories. Self-awareness came on the liquor store shelf, next to countless bears just like me, all for sale (two for $10, one goes home with you and the other goes to charity). So I don’t remember any mama bear in my life.

I wonder what happened to my mother. What was she like?

Wayne R Bilenduke/Stone/Getty Images

Polar bear mothers are so focused on the cubs that they don’t even eat during the winter—all their resources go to their offspring. I don’t think my mother was polar bear. But if she had been, she would have protected me for two years—I never would have got to live in the liquor store.

Photograph by Norbert Rosing

Black bear mothers will fight to the death for their cubs. I doubt my mother was a black bear. If she had been, we would have roamed around eating garbage, grass, and (OMG!) insects. I would never have got to live at the liquor store.

Grizzly mama bears spend over three years training their cubs how to map out territory and find food. When grizzly cubs sense danger, they run to their mothers (black bear cubs run to the trees). I don’t have any survival instincts whatsoever, so I’m thinking my mother wasn’t a grizzly.

Photo: Alaska Stock Images

Brown bears like posing for photographs. Maybe my mother was a brown bear.

We’ll just never know. But it looks like I missed out on living in the wild, hibernating, eating bugs, getting shot by Sarah Palin, never getting to watch Breaking Bad…

And my adoptive mum shared a beer with me last night, which makes her okay in my book.