Early Morning Coffee

Early Morning Coffee

 SSI

     Life has its own intent…our part is to just show up.

 

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     Life offers up to us certain simple moments of pleasure. Maybe not always big ones, like the thrill of love, or the terror of skydiving. They’re different for everyone. Early morning coffee is one of mine.

 

     It’s difficult to describe the joy to be found in my dark kitchen at 6:00 AM with a hot cup of coffee. Quiet, only the whirring of the refrigerator’s nervous system and the plop, plop of ice cubes. Nothing moves, everybody’s asleep. No big thoughts, often no thoughts at all. Just myself, the dark and the solitude augmented by the slow rush of caffeine.

 

     Ah, caffeine, my drug of choice, an addiction unbroken since the first taste in high school. The ‘slow rush’ of caffeine soothes my tenuous ticker. It can no longer tolerate the wind-‘em-up, shoot-‘em-out brain-bursts and eye-explosions of full bore caffeine. Now it’s the senior citizen’s formula: one-third regular, two thirds decaf.

 

     Rush-rush mornings are a curse from hell. Rapid movement before 10:00 is inhumane. Yes I know, some folks scorn such a decadent wake-up routine with utter disgust, claiming what a waste of good energy. These adrenaline junkies fly out of bed, flood the house with light, flick on the TV and fry up breakfast. Pray for them. 

 

     Some prefer the moments of slow sunsets to distill the day’s closure. In fact, nothing beats a cold Miller Lite while watching a golden sunset. It seems to squeeze out the sponge of the day’s details. It’s just different. The difference seems to be that the morning’s hopes and dreams of the day lie ahead: new, unexplored, expansive, while the day’s end simply wraps up what the preceding hours dredged up.

 

     Now this is no attempt to proselytize or convert anyone from their own morning proclivities. Habits are ruts, good ones and bad ones. Some redeem, others condemn. My father had his own peculiarity.  

 

     He’d sit at a small round table in the kitchen staring silently into the darkness outside. A tiny light from the small transistor radio reflected on his cup and saucer. He listened to the static whisper of the day’s fishing report on Lake Seminole and the weather forecast. That was about the extent of his wake-up.

 

     The peculiar thing was he drank his steaming-hot coffee from a saucer, not a cup, a habit inherited from his mother. He called it ‘saucering.’  I have never heard of anyone else doing this until I read of it in Streets of Laredo by McMurtry.

 

     Back in March, 2002, I ran across a poem, Comeback, by Tess Gallagher. It seemed to sum up my penchant for early morning coffee in a dark place. Here it is:

 

     My father loved first light.

     He would sit alone

     at the yellow formica table     

     in the kitchen with his coffee cup

     and sip and look out

     over the strait. Now,

     in what could be the end of my life, or worse,

     the life of someone I love, I too

     am addicted to slow sweet beginnings.

     First bird call. Wings

     in silhouette. How the steeples

     of the evergreens make a selvage

     for the gaunt emerging sky.

 

     My three loves are far away

     in other countries,

     and one is even under

     this dew-bright ground

     where the little herds

     of jittery quail peck

     and scurry for their lives.

 

     My father picks up his cup.

     Light is sifting in

     like a gloam of certainty

     over the water. He knows

     something there in the half light

     he can’t know any other way.

 

     And now I know it with him: so much

     is joining us in the dawn

     that no one can ever be parted.

     It steals over us because we left

     the warm beds of our dreams

     to sit beside what rises.

     I think he wants to stay there

     forever, my captain, gazing but not

     expecting, while the world

     begins, and, in a stark silent calling,

     won’t tell anyone what it’s for.

 

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     Life offers up to us certain simple moments of pleasure. Early morning coffee is my rut.  What’s yours?

 

 

Bud Hearn

March 15, 2018