In Praise of…The Gin & Tonic

The solemnity that obtains just before you cut the perfect limes in half and open them up to the world is over soon…and probably not remarked upon if you are characterized by the adult arrow of focus and not looking for material. But if you are looking…and open to the chance that the all inhabits even the infinitely small, you may notice the way the juice from a freshly cut and freshly squeezed Key Lime ecstatically shades an otherwise gorgeously monochromatic G&T…rendering it subtly but inescapably other…a citrus uncanniness

blossoming.

My wife bought this squeezer, and it seemed silly to me being so small. It made a brief little wave in the force field of our every day, occupying a space at the bottom of the sink before it was rinsed off and put away in a drawer filled with all the detritus of culture…the crab forks, and the tongs that hold snail shells, and the gauges to monitor the progress of raw flesh to charred briands.

I am not an aficionado of tequila drinks so don’t know the value of the Margarita…a class of drinks in which citrus plays a contrapuntal, though necessary, role to the spiny nectar. My idea of the lime is to see it floating ever so coyly in a bath of fine gin, giving over its spunk to the juniper and the ice. It is the peeking garter, the fine young lass just on the edge of the intimate knowledge.

Well, that silly squeezer mechanism does the most wonderful things for the G&T. There is a beautiful fall of juice at the outset. It just goes in so nicely with this metal gadget…so much better than you would get from your hands, and I am a FAN of the do-it-by-hand-I-am-being-an-apologist-for-all-that-is-modern kind of guy. This crisp cataract of citrusy loveliness, way more juice than you’d expect from a lime that occupies the space of a quail’s egg, joins the tributary of gin and the islands of ice, and the barge-y tonic. And into this frothy completeness, I squeeze one more lime and get the perfectly astringent, perfectly clear, clarity-inducing G&T.