The First Sip

This dark blue one with the chip? It's MINE and mine alone!

Better students would have remembered what the paper topic was, or what they wrote about. Perhaps they would have even kept the paper. I did none of these things. I’m not even certain which class I wrote the paper for in college—although I think it was for the capstone class in my senior year of undergrad.

What I do remember is that I was slammed. Several papers due in just a couple of days. The desperate attempt to get everything done perfectly in my quest to FINALLY graduate. It was late at night. I was exhausted. I was the only one awake, but I wasn’t going to be awake for much longer, at the rate I was going.

I was bringing new meaning to burning the candle at both ends.

It was that night that I made my first pot of coffee. Before that night I had vehemently professed my hatred of the stuff without ever trying it. I didn’t even enjoy the smell—and would complain when J would make himself a whole pot each morning.  So, once the percolator was finished doing its thing, I took the largest cup I could find—one of J’s, actually—and I filled it up with scoops of sugar and half a cup of milk. Then it was a splash of coffee, and my first sip.

I’ve never looked back.

I gave it up while I pregnant with Ant, and it was difficult, to say the least. It was the first thing I asked for once I could start eating after the c-section. Having gone nearly nine months without it, I felt the immense rush of caffeine, and my blood vessels constricting, all over again. I felt alert, even with the morphine drip.

Coffee has played a role in some of my favorite moments. I drank it religiously throughout graduate school. While others met for pitchers of beer after class, my friends and I headed to a Mom & Pop coffee shop to wax poetic on what we had discussed in our seminar. Each morning, as baby Ant took his morning nap and after K was safely delivered to first grade, I would make myself a cup of coffee, sit on the balcony, and start my reading for class.

I can still feel the sun shining down on me during crisp fall mornings and the steam rising from the class as I cracked open books relating how the built environment of the American landscape hid cultural symbols.

Of course, I continued to drink it as I wrote out midterm assignments and term papers in the evenings, once everyone else had gone to bed.

Now, on the weekends, in particular, I start the coffee and sit in my favorite place and begin the day. On Saturdays I often blog first thing in the morning, before everyone else awakes, and drink my coffee in the silence of still slumbering house. On Sunday mornings, J and I drink coffee together while watching the Sunday morning show and commenting on whatever happens to flit through our minds.

Now I remember my grandmother drinking coffee with her cronies late at night (I was supposed to be in bed, but always found five reasons that I needed to get up), playing cards and swapping stories.

It’s funny to me that we can focus so many of our favorite memories around a single inanimate object. It makes me wonder what neural connection is responsible for such constructions in our minds. Whatever it may be, this is certain—we each do it; we each have that one item of comfort that may be arbitrary to others, but does nothing but invoke the sunniest memories of our past days. When I think of my coffee, I think of writing, I think of ideas, and I think of stories. I don’t suspect that this bond will be broken anytime in the near future.

This post was written in response to Mama Kat's Writing Workshop prompt:  How did your love affair with coffee begin?