When you look up the National Day calendar, a lot of the days have more than one “thing” honored.  Today there is only one.  The daiquiri.  If nothing else, I will learn how to spell daiquiri.

Generally a daiquiri has strawberries, sugar and rum.  A Pina Colada is coconut milk, pineapple, sugar and rum.  I don’t know why it isn’t called a daiquiri.  Probably to make me ask silly questions.

In my early twenties, I lived for a time in Biloxi, Mississippi.  A refreshing strawberry daiquiri on a hot muggy day was a treat.  Blue Hawaiians were also popular.  They had rum, blue curacao, pineapple juice and sugar.  They were my favorite.  Served in a hurricane glass.  During the time I lived there, no hurricanes visited the shoreline.  I was lucky.

I remember the police clearing the beaches some afternoons because of the dangerous heat index.  I had a friend that was pregnant and when we went to the beach she would dig a hole for her growing belly, then lie on her stomach like the rest of us.  She told us the cool sand put the baby to sleep.

I miss those days.  I was young, innocent, not afraid of anything, and thought life would always be rosy.  Now I know how naïve I was, and life has given me way too much experience in unpleasant ways.  (Disenchantment, divorce, death, money problems, etc.)  On the up side, I now have the ammunition to be able to write about life and make it real.

A few years back I read an article that said a woman’s personality could be pegged by what she drank.  A woman who orders a strawberry daiquiri is a high maintenance person who wants her own way.  I haven’t ordered one since.  I wouldn’t want to give people the wrong impression.