… Morning coffee braces the rational,
lines up agendas, committees,
and classes, untangles the
wires that pull us like puppets
through another stage of another day …
Our coffee maker, a regular Braun drip pot in which we daily dump our Dunkin Donuts blend, sighs soulfully in the midst of its perking: "Aah-hh," it says, "umm-hh," sounding disappointed and very human. The first time we heard it, I was alarmed, thinking, "What have I done now?" But Jeanne, my wife, was looking at me as if I had sighed; and the pot did it again.
We've got used to this mournful sound, but it's an odd way to start the day. We wonder why our coffeepot is so unhappy. Was it expecting a little more class, more expensive beans, something like Mocha Java Jive or Ethiopian River Roast? "Look," I told it one morning, "don't be such a snob. Dunkin Donuts was recommended by Consumer Reports." We're fans of Consumer Reports, which also recommended the Braun.
"Aah-hh," the pot said. "Umm-hh."
We used to make espresso in a little wasp-waisted Italian pot, very strong stuff, and tasty, but the process was time-consuming: Shake the beans into a grinder, grind to a fine powder, measure it into the cup, clean the grinder, and wait for the bubbling sound (our Italian never sighed: at most, it seemed over-excited). Though it's been said that the Intelligent Designer gave us opposable thumbs so we could make coffee, I found that most mornings my thumbs are more opposable than necessary, and making espresso was a lot of work. Besides, we have a very small stove, so we switched to the Braun drama queen, which we can leave on the counter. Its sighing, though puzzling, isn't as abrasive as the grating fingernails of the grinder. (Consumer Reports claimed its favorite was the ground Dunkin Donuts, not the whole beans, thus getting me off the hook there, too.)
I started drinking coffee in college and quickly became addicted, cramming for exams through long night hours fueled by coffee and cigarettes. From that time on, I may have missed a day somewhere along the line, but can't remember when, so it's possible now that I've had at least one cup of coffee well over 20,000 mornings in a row.
At first I worried about the addictive aspect of this. But gradually I came to see that everything's addictive: alcohol, sex, music, television, tennis, salt, chocolate, jogging, work, hot showers, the morning newspaper. Even writing these Poet's Notebooks is more fun than it should be. Murderers, they say, get addicted to killing. Politicians are addicted to lying. President Bush is addicted to terrorism, can't get enough of it. I look at my own day: What have I done that isn't addictive? I like that idea, because in a world where everything's addictive, addiction loses its frightening look, even its meaning.
My affair with coffee surged from addiction to obsession after I first went to Paris in 1956, when I was in the Army, stationed in Würzburg, Germany. On my first weekend leave, I jumped on the train, still in uniform, and changed in the Men's Room at the Gare de Lyon station under the stern eye of a matron. I hurried out to the nearest café and, calling on my small French, my coffee habit, and another addiction, Hemingway, I mispronounced firmly, "Un café au lait, s'il vous plaît. Et un pernod." Four minutes later, I learned that up to then I hadn't really been drinking coffee at all. In a sense, Jeanne and I have been trying to recreate that taste for 50 years and so are amazed (étonné!) to have wound up drinking Dunkin Donuts from a neurasthenic container.
Of course, my major addiction is writing, and I'm writing this because to me the two activities — drinking coffee and writing — are inseparable. When the children were young, I wrote at night, using coffee to stay awake; now, in a healthier mode, I write in the morning, with my second cup in a thick Joe's Diner kind of mug sitting on my desk as a reminder not to get too fancy-pants about this business. Remember you grew up in Brooklyn, you bum, in Flatbush no less, so don't let Paris go to your head.
I know this is silly, of course, but I'm serious, too. What can we do to change things, a friend asked, as citizens of a huge country that's misbehaving in a world falling apart? I have no idea. Maybe all we can do is admit our addictions, and try bending them toward simple decency, which seems to be getting lost, in the small hope that the headlines our children will read someday won't be as cruel and heartless as ours. I don't think my poetry will change the world, but as Howard Nemerov (1920-1991) put it in his lovely poem, "Lion & Honeycomb," I keep looking …
… for words that would
Enter the silence and be there as a light.
So much coffee and so many cigarettes
Gone down the drain, gone up in smoke,
Just for the sake of getting something right
Once in a while …
"Aah-hh. Umm-hh."
OK, I hear you, I hear you. I'm coming.
Peter Meinke's most recent book is Unheard Music, a collection of stories. The lines at the beginning of this column are from his poem "Coffee," in Zinc Fingers (2001). He will give a reading at Clearwater Library on Thursday, Sept. 20, at 7 p.m.
This article appears in Sep 19-25, 2007.