May 22, 2016
My first recollection of coffee is at the kitchen nook table at my folk’s home in Granada Hills. Three or four at the time, my image is a little fuzzy. However, I figure my first awareness of coffee were during my wombed days. Mamma, on the other hand, was three or four when her folks began allowing her a spoonful of coffee each morning. Little wonder that by the time of my wombed days coffee was not only normal but embodied.
Until the microwave came along, I figure daddy’s enjoyment of coffee was questionable. Morning coffee met mom’s standards. Being a coffee drinker since the age of three meant her coffee standard was just this side of chaw—coffee poured sluggishly from the pot. Using the word miracle for the microwave seems a little over the top, but only for those whose coffee lacks the consistency of mud. For those who live with mudders, but prefer drinking to chewing, miracle is an apt term. The miracle lies in the microwave’s ability to allow for one pot and two different cups of coffee. One cup filled to the brim with coffee. The other half filled, topped off with water and placed into the microwave for twenty or thirty seconds. Two cups, two consistencies, two different ideas of coffee.
One can hardly turn around any longer without stepping on another coffee shop and barista. The choices of having ones coffee either black or with sugar seem archaic. Meetings and conversations with friends over an Espresso, Macchiato, Latte, or Frappé, in a coffee shop, are today’s norm. Yet there was the liminal time of the microwave, somewhere between the twelve-cup coffee pot and the individual barista cup. That was a time, when the miracle of the microwave allowed two people to sit across a table and talk, contemplate, and laugh, while taking in a breeze swaying tree leaves outside the window.
Chewing the Cud 