Coffee

an Ode

I set an alarm (which should be illegal on a Sunday but there’s that), woke up at o’dark bleary eyes when I heard the small chime ringing in my dreams, attended to my bladder (that 24/7 workhorse), and I made my way to the coffee machine (that other workhorse).

At this point, I should confess that I’ve always had bedhead but these past few years, I’ve been takin’ it to a whole nother level. Think bird’s nest meets giant hair ball. I mean, there aren’t words but there is a picture apparently, if the tea towel Curt had set up next to the coffee machine hints to me.

From Snoopy’s frazzled ears to my morning mirror, my word. We are twinning.

Some of you know that Snoopy is my spirit animal and my everything. And so is coffee. Two of my two favorite things, together at long last.

Next to the coffee machine, Curt had also thoughtfully placed the grinder filled with beans and my travel mug.

Today is a work today. My office is a farm and my pulpit, grief, love, and remembrance. In a few short hours, I will sing praise and lend lament to a gorgeous human who loved her some Starbucks, but only if it was a corporate Starbucks because she had coffee standards.

And I get it. I get her. I couldn’t do any of it without coffee as my fuel. Or so I make up.

Coffee beans are storied. The life cycle of a bean ~ from the grower who gets up before the wee hours to plant, to harvest, to roast to ship, to distribute, to retail, to purchase, to grind, to make, to drip, to pour, to drink, to savor. From the plant’s tips to our lips, truly.

I want to make up that I have standards, but the truth is, I get my French Roast coffee from Costco which means I’m not exactly boycotting Starbucks as I should. My husband and son? They have standards.

Their beans are poured into their quasi-industrial espresso machines, a Jura and a Breville Barista, respectively. They have a kind of fair-trade thing going on between the two of them. Wherever they are, be that their neighborhood, the Sunday market, or elsewhere on the planet, they shop for indie one-pound bags of coffee beans for each other. They are their own Silk Road, exchanging coffee and love, and keeping the shop local vibe alive.

Me? I’m a corporate sell-out who is rethinking all of her lazy if a tad more affordable shopping ways. I’ve been purchasing big bags of coffee since I’d buy them bulk and have them shipped to Pakistan when we lived there. Talk to be about absurdity and I will share the many layers of ridiculous in that tale.

These actions, too, are the story of coffee. Like tea, there is ritual, sustenance, enlivening, and the transmutation from that to this.

I will bring a bit of this sensibility to today’s celebration of life, when I glance upon the green Starbuck’s apron on the memorial table. How coffee is life, is happiness, is Snoopy.

On my own tribute table, I would want a sprinkling of coffee beans to help tell my story of bean there, done that, lived to tell about it until, alas, I didn’t.

Until then?

Mornings with coffee, praise be to the earth and her creative abundance.

Prose Poem (“The Morning Coffee.”)

by Ron Padgett

The morning coffee. I'm not sure why I drink it. Maybe it's the ritual
of the cup, the spoon, the hot water, the milk, and the little heap of
brown grit, the way they come together to form a nail I can hang the
day on. It's something to do between being asleep and being awake.
Surely there's something better to do, though, than to drink a cup of
instant coffee. Such as meditate? About what? About having a cup of
coffee. A cup of coffee whose first drink is too hot and whose last drink
is too cool, but whose many in-between drinks are, like Baby Bear's por-
ridge, just right. Papa Bear looks disgruntled. He removes his spectacles
and swivels his eyes onto the cup that sits before Baby Bear, and then,
after a discrete cough, reaches over and picks it up. Baby Bear doesn't
understand this disruption of the morning routine. Papa Bear brings
the cup close to his face and peers at it intently. The cup shatters in his
paw, explodes actually, sending fragments and brown liquid all over the
room. In a way it's good that Mama Bear isn't there. Better that she rest
in her grave beyond the garden, unaware of what has happened to the
world.

from Collected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2013).