coffee

Mortimer

/ wvfurandroot / Leave a comment

The other ones would make fun if they could see me.  My top rim is crimped and stained with lipstick.  The bottom is dented and misshapen from trips through the Keurig which is just a tad too small. 

I was intended to be a single use with retirement then imminent.  This chick has poured at least ten cups of coffee into me.  I feel so used.  And dirty.

But yet.

I should be in a landfill somewhere making conversation with pods, coffee filters, and wadded-up paper towels – all of my single-use kindred – but here I am with some sort of demented environmentalist who assuages her guilt at using me, by using and using and using me.  She’s a demon.

She says she likes the way I fit into her hand.  Hell’s bells.  I’m just a 20 oz foam coffee cup.  Made for take-out and advertising – Waffle House in cheerful black letters on yellow squares.    The slogan is “America’s Place to Work” – when did I become a help wanted ad?  I’m not suited for such.  Who digs through the trash looking for tips on places to work?  Is that the sort of person they want?

I hope not.  I liked Theresa and Tony.  I watched them from my place in the tower of cups next to the Bunn coffee machine.  They were fun.  Easy banter back and forth.  Theresa giggled a lot.  Tony looked at her at every opportunity.  I wondered if they were having a thing.  I knew my time was getting closer as my vantage point got closer and closer to being at the top of the tower of cups. 

And then I was next.  I could feel the breeze from the air vent on my nether region.

I heard her say, “Oh, and a large coffee to go, please.”  With that I was pried off of my neighbor and filled with the steaming hot substance that keeps them going.  A lid smartly slapped on.  She carried me to the car and then she carried me into her home. 

I was sipped until emptied and expected to find myself in a waste can, but no.  Next thing I know, I’m being mashed into a too short Keurig and am filled with more coffee.  It hurts my rim when she does that.  Not to mention my bottom.  She may be saving me from the landfill, but must she torture me in the process?

From my point of view, the landfill is not so bad once you get there.  The journey through waste receptacles, garbage trucks and that frightening dump from high in the sky is traumatic, but no more traumatic than your average human death. 

Time in the landfill, the recycled ones say, is sort of like retirement.  You just sit around shooting the shit and playing silly games.  Not so bad.

Not so bad here, either.  I’ve got a new group of friends here on her desk.  The stapler, I’ve never met one you know.  As long as he keeps his sharp points to himself, we’ll be friends.  The tape.  The pen.  I understand that at some coffee shops the waitress writes names on the cups.  I think I would like to have a name and not just be part of a lot number.  The pen and I are brainstorming on how to make that so. 

She often names some of her belongings.  I daydream that I’m special enough for a name, but refills go by and nothing.  I am trying to be content with my lot in life wondering how many more times she will use me.  She’s an addict.  I wonder who she will replace me with.  Will they have a name. Mortimer, maybe? I could be a Mortimer.

What’s Your TV ‘Comfort Food’?

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Writing Prompt: 
What’s Your TV ‘Comfort Food’? “Gilmore Girls”? “Friends”? “NCIS”?
What show do you turn to when you are stressed, tired or just need a lift? Why?

I don’t watch television or stream shows or movies.  I’m not visual and that sort of media doesn’t engage me for long.  I might be tempted if there was a Silly Symphony or Looney Tunes channel I could get.

I did go through a spell where I watched Law & Order, usually SVU, for hours at a time.  And I have no idea why.  But it certainly wasn’t to give me a lift.  It was an avoidance tactic.  And it left me with disturbing images and cynical thoughts.

I’ve written elsewhere about giving up Law & Order as a New Year’s resolution one year so I won’t bore you with that story again, but I will confess that now and again – many months apart nows and agains mind you – I might turn on Law & Order while housecleaning.  I don’t know why I do that either.

I do, however, have comfort music and comfort books.

When people I loved started dropping dead around me like raindrops in the April Appalachian Mountains, I developed what I call the Grief Quartet of CDs.  It was actually 5 CDS as one was a double album.  These were Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Allison Krauss, The Essential Leonard Cohen, AJ Roach’s Dogwood Winter, and The Cowboy Junkies Trinity Sessions. These 5 CDs have been in my CD changer of the Big Stereo since several days after Doug died in June of 2013.  I managed through trial and error and stupid luck to attach an Echo Dot to the Big Stereo and then network it so that when I fire up the Big Stereo every Echo in the house (and I have one in every room) plays the music.

Photo by Julia Peretiatko on Unsplash

I crank it up.  I pour coffee or wine or champagne.  And I wallow on my Beloved Sofa, and I sink intently into listening. 

My grief at losing 4 dogs, a father, a best friend, a partner and two co-workers within eight years of one another has morphed into sweet memories of days gone by.  I have beatified the dead – forgotten their flaws and celebrate what made me love them. 

My time with this music is now enjoyable.  Music, for the most part, and this music in particular is never just background music.  I listen with intent.  One CD after the other.  Sometimes I will use the remote to repeat a cut.  Sometimes two and three times until I have wrung every drop of comfort out of the lyrics and notes that I can.

I will listen to all five of the albums.  Dependent on how I am feeling as I finish the last one, I may fire up Mozart’s Jupiter symphony.  I love that piece. I’ve had the CD since CDs first came out.  I first listened to it with a Walkman and cheap headphones. 

I also have comfort books.  There are a few particular books – The Secret Garden.  Skinny Legs and All.  Time in its Endless Flight.  The Princess Bride — That I will flip through.  Or my collection of children’s pop-up books.

But every book in my house is a comfort book.  I enjoy my walls of books.  I like looking at them.  Knowing they are there.  I inherited many of them from two of the folks who died and they are mostly as of yet still unread.  I don’t read like I used to.  I hope to get back to it, but writing takes up a lot of my reading time.

My books are legion.  I say, and people think I’m joking, that I think the only thing holding up the barn are the bookcases.  It’s not a joke.  The bookcases reinforced walls and the roof.  I have far too many and I can’t part with any of them and I don’t need to.  I live alone.  There is no one to fuss about the piles of books everywhere.

But mostly I have comfort coffee. 

I love sitting in this room on a quiet snowy day listening to the furnace hum as the steam from a hot cup of coffee bathes my face.  I hold the cup like it is the Holy Grail.  Unlike music and books, I can do other things while I drink coffee.  I can think.  I can write.  I can make a to-do list.  I can read.  I can listen to music. 

But I particularly like silence with the first few cups of the day.  My brain is a noisy place and I sometimes can lower the talk radio in my head to a low murmur if I sit with the coffee lot enough.  Multiple cups of coffee.

I always come out the other side refreshed and ready to get on with things.

You can have the noise and chaos of a television show.  I’ll just be over here, sipping this coffee, letting my mind quiet and my spirit nestle like a dove who has returned home to her nest.

Hurray! It’s National Coffee Day!

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Today is National Coffee Day.  For me this is a high holiday.  I’m always tempted to decorate and make a luscious meal with wine that I can finish off with a robust cup of coffee – maybe with cream.  I generally drink, well always drink, my coffee black.  My father looked askance at me when I put cream in my coffee as if I was committing some crime.  Marines drink their coffee black.  None of this frou frou cream stuff.  After a grand dinner, however, I like the richness of cream in a really good roast of coffee not just for the taste of it, but the mouth feel and texture.  It becomes like liquid velvet. 

I drink Folgers coffee in the morning.  I do like a mild blend first thing in the morning, but it is one of my goals to be able to afford fresh ground Tanzanian Peaberry for my a.m. indulgence.  And indulgence it would be.  I think it reasonable to say that Tanzanian Peaberry is the nectar of the gods.  In my more hedonistic days, I used to buy a bag a month from a small coffee roaster in Milwaukee who was thrilled to ship it to me.  For a price. I’ve learned in life that you can have anything you want – for a price. 

But the immediate goal is to persevere with writing until it becomes a monetarily successive gig.  I’ve progressed from hobby writer to writer writer, but I’m still seldom a paid writer.  Don’t laugh, but I’ll probably celebrate my first book sale with a fine cup of coffee.  

Taped to the refrigerator, I have a quote by me: Sometimes coffee is a religious experience and others it’s just a caffeine delivery system.   

I once scribbled that in a notebook.  I said it to a few friends and one asked if she could quote me.  Flattered, I said, “Of course.”  I tried to meme it a few years ago, but alas it did not go viral.  I really do feel that way about coffee.  Folgers in the morning is a caffeine delivery system.  A robust blend with cream after fine dining is a religious experience. 

Whatever your preference – coffee, tea, hot cider or something else – please enjoy it today on this National Coffee Day in solidarity with me.  I swear, I can’t believe I don’t at least have a t-shirt for this holiday.  I have been remiss and shall remedy that later today!