I started writing this little blog post several days ago, inspired by @diebitch’s Coffee Love contest. When it grew into a post in its own right, I extracted it from my “Coffee by any other name” contest entry and determined that it needed to stand on its own. I had fun writing this little retrospective piece. I hope you enjoy reading it!

Coffee, how I love thee

I’m going to tell you a little story about my coffee addiction. It all started out so innocently….

When I was growing up, coffee was an adult beverage and came in three varieties: black, black with cream, and black with cream and sugar.

I managed to make my way through adolescence and two years of college before coffee passed my lips. The very idea of that pungent brown stuff was a little revolting, although its somewhat pleasant aroma always reminded me of my grandmother’s house. Drinking coffee never crossed my mind. I literally thought things like “No one ever hands you a cup of poop with a weird smile on their face. What makes them think it’s appropriate to do so with coffee?”

I grew up in a Folgers household, the daughter of a professor and a stay-at-home mother. We had a family of seven and things were tight. There was never even spare change around. My parents bought bakery outlet bread and took us to “U-pick” farms to get a lot of our food. “Dessert,” and I am not making this up, was usually canned peaches or pears that they had put up themselves. My siblings and I still remember those two times we got to have take-out.

But back to the Folgers. My parents, who had grown up on farms and drank strong black coffee from an early age, were confirmed coffee addicts. They purchased their coffee in economical, industrial-sized tins–the kind with the metal tab on top that released a little whush sound when you peeled it back. And there it was. That aroma of unfresh ground coffee that had been packaged for months or maybe eons.

And of course it just got better from there, because next they put the coffee grounds into a contraption called a “percolator” (which is another name for “coffee annihilator” for the uninitiated). From a young age, due to a terrible accident that nearly landed me in the hospital, I was certain that percolators were evil.

The incident happened like this. (Should I tell this? If you’re squeamish, just skip ahead a few paragraphs.) Okay, so I had the clever idea that this weird rack thing that went in the top of our antique dishwasher (a fancy “top loader” that had once been viewed as an innovative design), would make a nice little seat for my little rear. I was four years old.

Parenthetically, I will mention that I was extremely accident prone. I had a long stream of death-defying accidents as a child, starting with getting mowed down by a truck when I was two, but my parents had not yet seen the pattern that was shaping up, or they would never have allowed me near percolators, or dishwasher racks for that matter.

At the time, my parents had upgraded from the kind of percolator that you use to boil coffee on the stove top, to an electric percolator that knew when to stop perkin so it didn’t turn the coffee into a toxic sludge pit. This was the heyday of “The Jetsons,” so if that 60’s-era show comes to mind at this moment, that is completely appropriate.

You are wondering by now what a dishwasher rack has to do with unfresh Folgers and coffee annihilation. I will tell you. Electric things have cords, and the place where my undeveloped little mind thought to place my clever seat was next to the warm stove. I should mention here that we lived in an ancient, drafty house made in some previous century. The location where I placed the rack was right on top of the electrical cord to the fancy Jetsons percolator, which–as you can probably guess–contained newly perked coffee that was the approximate temperature of molten lava. My chair and I inadvertently pulled the cord, which turned over the percolator, which dumped the entire pot of burning hot coffee on me. Yeah, that hurt. And I have the shoulder scar to underscore that point.

ANYway, fast forward about 15 years to my junior year in college when, as I mentioned, coffee had not passed my lips. Can you blame me? Starbucks didn’t even exist then! You could get a latte or a cappuccino at a very upscale restaurant, but the concept of gourmet coffee had not yet been invented. This was pretty much the Pleistocene age of coffee history.

While I had not had any memorable disasters involving coffee in the intervening years, my relationship with coffee had not markedly improved. It still seemed like something you would drink if you were, oh, fat and middle aged and had a cigarette hanging out of your mouth and the gravel voice of Selma on The Simpsons. (Of course The Simpsons hadn’t been invented yet either.)

What happened my junior year is not what you think. No, I was not persuaded by a friend who could make decent, unboiled coffee to try some. (“The first one’s free!”) And no, I didn’t finally give up on my pact against perked toxic sludge due to final exams.

No. What happened was that I took a study abroad trip to Greece for six months. And in Greece, hospitality is a social norm, and we were coached prior to our travels that if someone offered you a little sup of something, by golly you would accept it. Not doing so was considered exceptionally rude. So, my first sip of coffee was actually the kind that is boiled in a little copper pot. They add a teaspoon of sugar and then pour it gently into a demitasse cup so that most of the grounds stay in the pot. (You may know it as Turkish coffee, but I’m sure the Greeks would prefer it to be known as Greek coffee.

It was good. I remember thinking with the first sip, “Okay, I survived that.” With the second sip I had a dawning awareness of the reason people are addicted. By the third sip, I joined their ranks.

The thing that sealed the deal is that in Greece you could buy a latte at any roadside patisserie, even in those days. I was firmly hooked by the end of that trip.

Why I love coffee

Oh, how I love you, little bean! The whole experience of coffee just makes me happy. I love waking up in the morning before anyone else is up and performing the delightful morning ritual of making freshly brewed java, and breathing in the amazing aroma that fills my kitchen. I make pretty simple coffee–a nice medium roast with some cream. But it starts my day off right. On mornings when I’m up plenty early I like to sit and write with that first cup of coffee of the day, when my brain is fresh and the ideas flow.

Obviously, I remember the days before the world woke up (pardon the pun) and started making great coffee. I think a lot of people drink it because you can basically have a dessert for breakfast, and no one looks askance at you. It’s also a mild drug that is perfectly condoned and legal. So you can actually drink your morning coffee and feel a little daring and borderline dangerous. It’s the little thrills that make this whole weird thing called life worth the daily grind. (Smile.)

###