I am being lazy today, but I was reading this editorial on the NYT and it touched me because in a way it could be story of my family. We are all huge coffee drinkers. There is no day where the day does not start with coffee, and there is no one that comes through the house and coffee is not offered to them. To this day my grandmother will insist on having any one have coffee, even when the cleaning lady comes in, even if she is late, she will insist, Lupita, have some coffee, then you can hurry about.
The article is by Judith Warner, it was published the 24th of January, here it is:
January 24, 2008, 9:00 pm
Memory Refill
At home, hidden in the bread box, I have a few samples of a “delicious” herb-chicory mix given to me by my acupuncturist to help me break my addiction to coffee.
It has gone untouched for months. Today, I think I will make the bold move of throwing it out.
I love coffee. And though I have, previously, shown myself willing to forgo all kinds of food and drink in the quest to rid myself of migraines, coffee is one habit that I am firmly committed never to break.
It’s not about the caffeine. I have largely renounced caffeine. I say largely because I know that the decaf I now drink all day isn’t entirely caffeine-free. My attachment to coffee is about the taste, and the smell, and the gesture.
I mean “gesture,” now, not in the way of French subway ads, where every ice cream pop, car or laundry detergent is either of a “gesture of freshness” or “a gesture towards pleasure.” I mean the kind of gesture my mother’s brother Mel used to make, waving toward the coffee pot, when you walked into his house in Brooklyn.
There was, first, the gesture toward the pot, always on, always ready, always warm. Then there was a gesture toward a cup, then a gesture toward a chair. Mel had been in World War II. He’d been left with a metal plate in his skull. There was always something formal, something military about his bearing.
At his behest, you’d sit down at the table, in the breakfast room off the kitchen, and you’d gesture into conversation. Or the grown-ups did, at least, while my cousins Michael and Jonathan and I went off and warred with some combination of Dawn dolls and G.I. Joes.
Mel died of a brain aneurism in 1985. He developed a blinding headache driving home from dropping Jonathan off at music camp and slipped into a coma within hours.
“He was always there, with the coffee cup in one hand and the cigarette in the other,” my mother said, bitterly, after the funeral.
In the years that followed, Mel’s wife, Barbara, and my mother and I spent many hours sitting around in that breakfast room. We’d drink coffee, and we’d jump in unison every hour on the hour, as the clock in the breakfast room opened to the maddening squawk of a cuckoo.
“Mel loved that clock,” Barbara would say.
These days, no one is “always there” with a coffee cup in his hand; nor is there anyone around with a cigarette. No decent person keeps the coffee pot brewing all day. No one would dream of drinking that much caffeine. No one would dream of sitting still all day to schmooze.
The only people who would are perhaps just the sort who might sneak out into the garden to smoke an occasional cigarette when their kids aren’t looking. Appealing people, I might be tempted to say. People who live in the grip of their passions. But suspect.
My husband, Max, used to smoke. In our early life together, I didn’t much mind. But by the time we had children it became a big issue; I did not want my children to have a father who was going to drop dead one day, coffee cup in one hand, cigarette in the other.
Early on, we lived briefly in the bottom two floors of a house in Brooklyn Heights. Max used to open the kitchen door to smoke. Sometimes, on weekend mornings, the smell of cigarette smoke would combine with the smell of coffee and a certain kind of sun-warmed Brooklyn air. And I’d be transported. Farther away than to the Victorian house in Midwood. Further back — to Flatbush, to the late 1960s, to a brick row house overflowing with great-aunts and grandparents, a kitchen filled with the smells of coffee and cookies and smoked fish and, of course, cigarettes. There were so many cigarettes: Pall Malls and Kents and Lucky Strikes, I think. (Or were the Lucky Strikes the chocolate cigarettes that my Aunt Fannie bought for me?)
My Aunt Fannie had a closet filled with secret things; finger paints and shiny paper, and crayons and scissors. In my memory, they are all just for me, but of course they weren’t; they were also for Michael and Jonathan.
Many of my memories of the house are false, it seems. The rooms were not arranged the way I remember them. It wasn’t a row-house at all, my mother says; it was semi-detached. Early childhood memories are notoriously inaccurate – and incomplete. I hadn’t even remembered the smell — that coffee and cigarettes and bagels and cream cheese and, with any luck, a couple of chocolate jelly rings smell — until Max opened the back door and God in his heaven sent in that perfect beam of sunlight.
It was 1994. Mel was dead, but Barbara was then still alive. The World Trade Center was still standing on the other side of the river. My father was still alive, though within a year he would no longer be, after collapsing on the street, on the way to his office from the Gramercy Park Coffee Shop — where he had his first few cups of the day, every day.
I wouldn’t be so pretentious as to say that I have measured out my life in coffee spoons. But it wouldn’t be so far from the truth. I began drinking coffee at the age of nine – teaspoons of warm, milky coffee from my father’s cup in restaurants after dinner. By age 11, I was drinking it chummily with my Mom over breakfast. I spent my adolescence over never-empty cups in places like Joe Junior’s and Lepanto’s and the Viand. There was time for this then, in my New York.
I miss that world terribly.
When Emilie greets me, after a long day in school, she buries her head in my neck and breathes deeply.
“You smell like coffee,” she says with satisfaction.
Every Monday, we have an hour’s break between school pickup and Julia’s violin lesson. Every Monday, wishing for a coffee shop, I take the girls to our local bakery-café. Julia and Emilie eat ersatz French pastries and I order a decaf. They do their homework, and I read the paper.
On the wall there is a mural of a village scene somewhere that looks something like Provence. There’s a cat in the mural who sits on a stone wall. We believe that the cat has magical powers: he can move at will between his wall in Washington and his wall in France.
When I get bored with reading the paper, I stare into his eyes. He is an exile of sorts, never entirely at home.
But I still have my coffee.
