Geeked Out

In Soviet Russia, Vodka drinks you!

29 September, 2011 (12:00) | Geeked Out

This one will be a story, within a story…where’s Christopher Nolan when you need him?

I wanted to make some martini one night, and I didn’t have any vodka.  Deirdre and Jordan were out and planning on coming over later, so I asked them to swing by the state store to pick up some vodka for me.  They wound up at my mom’s house, got distracted and lost track of time, and the wound up staying late enough to miss their chance to stop at the state store on their way home.  They mentioned their predicament to my mom, and she said that she thought she actually had a bottle of vodka that they could have.

The fact that my mom had a bottle of vodka was unusual alone, but as we would find out, this bottle of vodka was no ordinary bottle of vodka.  She went into her bedroom and pulled a tall blue box from her closet.  This box had been in her closet for about 10 years, when it came from my grandfather’s kitchen, where it had been sitting for another 20 or so years.

As the story goes, when my parents were living in Maryland, near Washington, D.C. in the late 70s,  my grandmother had gone down to spend some time with them around Christmas.  While she was down there, they went to the mall, and in one of the stores, my grandmother found a lady’s purse with a wallet in it.  My grandmother took it to the counter, but with her faith in humanity, she decided she did not trust the clerk not to take the cash, so she decided she would take the responsibility to return it to its owner herself.  They went home, looked up the person in the phone book, and the lady on the other end was delighted to know she had her wallet!  The lady gave her address to my grandmother to return it in person.  As they approached the house, they realized this was The USSR Ambassador’s house, and the lady’s wallet was the ambassador’s wife.  In exchange for the good deed, my grandmother was given this box of vodka, straight from the U.S.S.R.

And here it sits; unopen and slowly becoming a part of world history as an product of a country that no longer exists.  I was flabbergasted that my mom would just send this 35 year old bottle of vodka up and expect me just to crack it open and drink it.  This is a unique item!  this is an heirloom!

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