Adonijah, I made it.
I jumped Kadooment Day all the way from the Super Centre car park in Warrens to the southern end of the Spring Garden Highway at the traffic lights outside Kensington Oval, and proved to all the doubters that we people definitely still have something left in the bottle.
You should have been there. You would have been really proud to see me in action for the first time in about 15 years. Man, I surprised quite a few young females who came testing me for a joke only to end up amazed that despite my one-pack abs, I did have some good wine left in my bottle.
But don’t get me wrong. Yes, my wine might have been just as strong as that of the younger ones but it definitely was not as plentiful and no match. For while they poured theirs non-stop by the bottle, all I could muster was an occasional sip at a time.
The medical people recommend wine for your heart but that’s okay when you are sitting down eating a meal or reading a book or watching TV. Wine on the street is a totally different ball game and I made sure that my friend Dr Donna was always in sight whenever I yielded to the temptation to switch from a chip to taking a sip.
And, Ado, you see that skit that you did onstage in the Gymnasium with a young woman “bruk up” in an ambulance crying out your name over and over? That’s bare joke. Neither you nor I have enough left in any bottle to cause any such damage. In fact, the only way you could have done that was by physically hitting her with a real bottle, gallon preferably.
It’s all in your mind, my friend, and had you joined me on Kadooment Day you would have found out how hard it gets taking wine with one of those shapely, smooth-skin, younger things in skimpy costume and bent on showing you what time it is.
This might surprise you, but I discovered that none of them seemed to know how to tell time at all. For whether it was 1:30, 2:30 or 3:30, as far as they were concerned it was always 6:15, 6:20 or 6:30.
Yet, I represented us older winers really well with the properly aged, preserved and matured stuff I still have left in the bottle. So much so that when one female with a coke bottle full of younger wine tested me, she ended up telling my grandson Akeel that my wine was too strong for me to be a grandfather.
Originally, I had planned to do most of the route from the comfort of the music truck but the only times I went on the truck were outside the stadium to shelter from a downpour and at the end of Spring Garden to take some photos from an elevated position.
And hear this, Adonijah. Do you remember a certain young lady by the name of Tricia who works in accounts at the Nation? Well, this daughter bet me that I would never make it. In fact, she was so convinced that I couldn’t that she committed to cutting off her locks if I did.
Now she is claiming that was not what she said, but rather that she would eat it. So I am waiting to see how she is going to eat her hair without cutting it off.
Can’t wait for next year.