The Time Traveler's Life

It seems impossible to realize something so simple as the way a martini might taste could bring an array of life experience long buried in the ruins. Growing up, my aunts and mother drank martinis. It meant they were grown women; they had achieved a status in their age which allowed them to drink a true martini. I was allowed to "taste" these martinis and often was even allowed the olive which was soaked with the combination of liquors. I remember setting a goal for myself; a strange one it seemed, but it meant I would have become an adult woman....when I was 30 years old, I would order a martini. Somehow I put this off past the age of thirty and by the time I came around to it I was asked "with vodka or gin?" I knew vodka and chose it as the combination for my martini. It was always vodka and having been so many years since tasting one of my aunts drinks, it seemed fine. The other night all this changed. I was out on a special evening and the martini had a very fancy name, but it was made with gin. I ordered this martini and I was immediately transported back to my childhood. This was the martini the women I knew had drank and enjoyed. It was the martini once referred to in the "3 martini lunch" for serious business men. This is a martini to be reckoned with. I felt as though all this time, I had put the obstacle of the second rate vodka martini in my way. I had settled for less than a true martini could offer me. It was not about intoxication; rather it was about ownership of maturity. Having felt the power of the aunts and my mother over the years, their emancipation came from sharing this cocktail socially long before women were allowed to make more personal choices for themselves. Before the woman's liberation movement; this seemed to put them on equal footing with their male counterparts. Women were just beginning to enter the career arena as doctors, lawyers, school principals........university professors........they did not need to look for obstacles to block their miracles; the world was doing a good job at suppressing these women and their power. Though it was not so very long ago, it is hard to appreciate the struggle most women had before the 1960's.
During this time, many, many groups fought their way out of discrimination and prejudice. The new rights and laws to give equal rights to everyone are rarely appreciated by the present generations of these groups. But I could see those women, my aunts, again in those rooms, sipping on a gin and vermouth martini. Letting go of the inner turmoil of life which was holding them down. Their time was not my time; their martini was not my martini. My spirit felt a lightness drinking this martini because my aunts and my mother were suddenly in the same room with me and this was just the drink I needed.