My New Best Friend

Meet my new friend…

Coffee.

I’ve been acquainted with coffee since childhood.   I used to sip my dad’s demitasse cup of black coffee after dinner when we ate over my grandparents’ house.   I liked it, but only a sip at a time.  The tiny cup… the tiny spoon…  the mountains of sugar my dad added to it.  In my eyes, it was coffee made for a kid.  Plus, it really pleased my relatives to see me drinking espresso; they thought I had really Italian sensibilities.  But I could never get into brown coffee.  It was just so bitter.  It always came in such a large cup, too – who could drink that much?  So instead, for a long time, I copied mom.  She liked tea.  But then she started doing weird things with her tea as she got older, like dipping the teabag for only about 10 seconds before taking it out.  The lighter the tea, the better.  It was like drinking hot, colored water.

Yuck. 

But that’s another story altogether.  Coffee is not colored water. 

When I was student teaching, I also had to take a statistics class on Saturday mornings. Class started at 9:00 a.m.  I went to the first class (three consecutive hours of math – just shoot me) and I struggled to stay awake.  I remember when I was driving there the next Saturday, I had an epiphany…  I got a Starbucks Café Mocha, hoping it would keep me awake, and eureka, in those moments I had discovered the wonder of caffeine.  I stayed awake for the whole class.  Awake, alert, and ready to learn, baby!

Still, I converted to daily coffee drinking in small steps.  At home, we signed up for Gevalia, mostly for the free coffee pot.  What a pleasant surprise!  If you haven’t tried Gevalia, you should.  I think it’s the best coffee around, overall.  Then again, I’m not a professional coffee drinker, so what do I know, really?  I just know that Gevalia is great, and my aunt’s coffee, for example, tastes like Draino, even if you try to disguise it with lots of sugar and a quarter cup of milk.  Anyway, eventually, we moved on from Gevalia (which is pretty expensive, and it’s hard to make a pot of coffee when you really want just one cup) to a Keurig coffee maker with my new favorite coffee:  Green Mountain Columbian Fair Trade Select.  I love it.  A just opened box of k-cups from Costco is a beautiful sight. 

I’ve noticed that coffee is more than just the taste, it’s the whole experience… it’s the sound of the pot in the morning (whatever sound your pot makes), the smell, the warmth of the cup in your hand.  Holding the cup as you walk around at work (if you’ve gifted yourself with a travel mug, like I have) is like wearing your comfy bedroom slippers at work.  I ask you, who cannot use another few minutes of comfy slippers in the morning?

DISAPPOINTMENT - 11 year old style...

     My son is extremely disappointed that his game, Halo Reach, didn’t arrive in the mail today, as scheduled.  We special ordered the game from Costco.com for his birthday, which was last week on the first day of school (the poor kid).  In spite of playing video games way too often (is this the case with most 11 year old boys?) he wanted this game like kids in the early 80's wanted Rubic's cubes... Smurfs... Cabbage Patch dolls, oh you know, he HAD TO GET IT.  According to my son, this stupendous, miraculous game had its world wide release TODAY, September 14, 2010. (Is he SURE it’s today?  I think it must be tomorrow.)  But when he got home from dischool, he checked the mailbox.  Nothing.  Checked the front porch, where the UPS man usually leaves packages.  Nothing.  There were no Post-It-like notes stuck to the front screen door, ala, Fed Ex. Man.  This being the case, I ask you, what is a newly-turned-11-year-old boy to do?  He’s been pacing the floor since he got home from school.  He did his homework in a microsecond, anticipating the delivery of the videogame package, knowing I wouldn’t let him open it until the homework was done.  All for nothing.  (Who cares about education?  Not my son!)  His life was a total disappointment, he informed me.  (Yeah, who cares about the bike he got this summer, and all the great things we did in the past two months?)  I joked with him, "Yeah, it's the end of the world.”  “It IS,” he tells me.  He starts a negative rant about Costco, telling me he’ll never buy another thing there again (… which is no big loss for Costco, since it’s really ME that does the shopping there, and I have no intention of boycotting.)  As a matter of fact, he’ll never even set FOOT in Costco again.  I imagine him standing just outside the wide open doorway of our local Costco, arms folded in front of his chest, and chin up in the air, as a few employees try to coax him inside to no avail.   I chuckle. “My life is over.” He informs me.   We are sitting in the parking lot at his karate dojo when he tells me this.  He’s flopping around the car, venting his disappointment and frustration.  "Ok, It’s time for karate," I tell him.  He gives me a joking glare and states dramatically, “I’m not going in there until my video game is delivered!” but when I glare back at him he knows I’m serious and he heads inside. 

     In my boring, adult mind, I keep thinking, I can't believe he's making such a big deal out of this, but you know, tomorrow, when the game does arrive, he's going to be the happiest little man in the world, and I'll be marveling (and appreciating) the pure simplicity of boys.