Life has its own intent…our part is to just show up.
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Life offers up to us certain simple moments of pleasure. Maybe not always big ones, like the thrill of love, or the terror of skydiving. They’re different for everyone. Early morning coffee is one of mine.
It’s difficult to describe the joy to be found in my dark kitchen at 6:00 AM with a hot cup of coffee. Quiet, only the whirring of the refrigerator’s nervous system and the plop, plop of ice cubes. Nothing moves, everybody’s asleep. No big thoughts, often no thoughts at all. Just myself, the dark and the solitude augmented by the slow rush of caffeine.
Ah, caffeine, my drug of choice, an addiction unbroken since the first taste in high school. The ‘slow rush’ of caffeine soothes my tenuous ticker. It can no longer tolerate the wind-‘em-up, shoot-‘em-out brain-bursts and eye-explosions of full bore caffeine. Now it’s the senior citizen’s formula: one-third regular, two thirds decaf.
Rush-rush mornings are a curse from hell. Rapid movement before 10:00 is inhumane. Yes I know, some folks scorn such a decadent wake-up routine with utter disgust, claiming what a waste of good energy. These adrenaline junkies fly out of bed, flood the house with light, flick on the TV and fry up breakfast. Pray for them.
Some prefer the moments of slow sunsets to distill the day’s closure. In fact, nothing beats a cold Miller Lite while watching a golden sunset. It seems to squeeze out the sponge of the day’s details. It’s just different. The difference seems to be that the morning’s hopes and dreams of the day lie ahead: new, unexplored, expansive, while the day’s end simply wraps up what the preceding hours dredged up.
Now this is no attempt to proselytize or convert anyone from their own morning proclivities. Habits are ruts, good ones and bad ones. Some redeem, others condemn. My father had his own peculiarity.
He’d sit at a small round table in the kitchen staring silently into the darkness outside. A tiny light from the small transistor radio reflected on his cup and saucer. He listened to the static whisper of the day’s fishing report on Lake Seminole and the weather forecast. That was about the extent of his wake-up.
The peculiar thing was he drank his steaming-hot coffee from a saucer, not a cup, a habit inherited from his mother. He called it ‘saucering.’ I have never heard of anyone else doing this until I read of it in Streets of Laredo by McMurtry.
Back in March, 2002, I ran across a poem, Comeback, by Tess Gallagher. It seemed to sum up my penchant for early morning coffee in a dark place. Here it is:
My father loved first light.
He would sit alone
at the yellow formica table
in the kitchen with his coffee cup
and sip and look out
over the strait. Now,
in what could be the end of my life, or worse,
the life of someone I love, I too
am addicted to slow sweet beginnings.
First bird call. Wings
in silhouette. How the steeples
of the evergreens make a selvage
for the gaunt emerging sky.
My three loves are far away
in other countries,
and one is even under
this dew-bright ground
where the little herds
of jittery quail peck
and scurry for their lives.
My father picks up his cup.
Light is sifting in
like a gloam of certainty
over the water. He knows
something there in the half light
he can’t know any other way.
And now I know it with him: so much
is joining us in the dawn
that no one can ever be parted.
It steals over us because we left
the warm beds of our dreams
to sit beside what rises.
I think he wants to stay there
forever, my captain, gazing but not
expecting, while the world
begins, and, in a stark silent calling,
won’t tell anyone what it’s for.
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Life offers up to us certain simple moments of pleasure. Early morning coffee is my rut. What’s yours?
Bud Hearn
March 15, 2018