make ready, lose count
of scoops small step of faith
great start but no notes

My day starts the night before around 10:30pm.

At 10:30pm, I get the coffee maker set up to make coffee the next morning.

I am a coffee nut but a strict orthodox coffee nut.

I will enjoy a Starbucks or any other boutique coffee or latte or cafe au lait.

I will put up with the strange arrogance of vente, grande and whatever else I have to say when I want to order a small coffee with milk.

I will go so far as to say that the best cup of coffee I ever ordered was the Ho Chi Minh City at Cafe Amico in Suwanee, Georgia.

Best cup of store bought coffee anyway.

When you get right down to it, it all tastes the same after the third sip.

I have used the kuerig.

I think we have owned several.

But, dog gone it, I want a pot of coffee.

For a real orthodox coffee nut, the test is not the specialty coffees but the daily coffee in the pot at home.

I know I have quoted this before but in the book of short stories that led to the play and movie, “Life with Father,” Clarence Day describes a breakfast with his Dad.

A breakfast with bad coffee.

Mr. Day, Jr., writes:

At breakfast, Father would put down his coffee-cup in disgust and roar:

“Slops! Damn it, slops!

Does she call this confounded mess coffee?

Isn’t there a damned soul in Westchester County who knows how to make coffee but me?

I swear to God I can’t even imagine how she concocts such atrocities.

I come down to this room hungry every morning, and she tries to fill me with slops!

Take it away, I tell you!” he would bellow to the waitress.

“Take this accursed mess away!”

And while she and Delia were frantically hurrying to make a fresh pot, he would savagely devour his omelet and bacon, and declare that his breakfast was ruined.

When I first read this story years and years ago I felt I understood just what Clarence Day, Sr., meant.

If my morning coffee isn’t ‘right’ (no need for the word just here, not ‘just right’ just ‘right’) then the rest of the day is in jeopardy if not gone.

I like to say that God created the heavens and the stars and so separated the Day from the Night so there would be morning.

I like to say that God created morning so there would be coffee.

The Bible says we are created in God’s image.

Therefore it can be said that God must have a nose.

If God has a nose, God can smell.

Note the many verses in the Bible that describe sacrifices making a pleasing aroma.

Grilled lamb or steak with clouds of savory smoke drifting up to Heaven.

If there are pleasing aroma’s in Heaven then they must have coffee there.

I told you I was orthodox in my beliefs.

My day starts then when I get the coffee maker set up the night before.

For such a important part of my day tomorrow I can be cavalier about how I go about preparing the coffee maker.

It would make sense that I have a precise regimen that I follow with exactitude but, being me, I don’t.

The brand of coffee is not carved in stone.

I switch from time to time.

Sometimes just to change.

Sometimes based on price.

Sometimes based on availablity.

Right now I am using Café Bustelo.

I don’t worry about the water.

It doesn’t bother me that it will sit all night.

I guess it’s going to sit all night somewhere.

Here in the low country of South Carolina there are water towers so the city water delivery system IS based on gravity.

But the area is dotted with GRAVITY ASSIST PUMPSTATIONS at ground level to make sure water can make it up and into the multi story apartment buildings.

Then the filter goes in place.

Then I measure out the coffee.

I am making eight cups.

I will have 2 or 3 in the morning following the ‘endless cup’ method of continually warming up a cup of coffee.

My wife will have cup.

And then later that day I will make up a large iced cafe au lait with the leftovers.

There was a time when it was thought I should limit myself to a single cup of coffee.

So I did.

After I went out and bought the biggest cafe au lait mug I could find.

It was like carrying around a punch bowl.

To make eight cups of coffee takes 8 level scoops of Cafe Bustelo.

This is where the fun happens.

With everything that is riding on this simple act I cannot tell how often I lose count.

I hear a noise.

I think of a noise.

I think of something.

I look back at the TV.

Something happens and I am standing there with a scoop in one hand, can of coffee in the other, staring into the coffee maker and wondering … 5 … 7… 3?

I look at the coffee already in the filter and there is really no help to determine mass versus measurement from the size of the pile of coffee.

Then the descision.

Dump it out and start over which is the safe way.

The sane way.

Or roll the dice.

Add another measure or two of coffee and hope for the best.

Even though this has immense bearing on how my day will go this is the usual route that I choose.

I say to myself ‘Well, it is either going to be too strong or too weak, but there it is.”

I close up the coffee maker.

Put the coffee away.

I go to bed wondering, what will I pour out in the morning.

As I type this I think BOY AM I DUMB.

So here is what bothers me.

Once in awhile I make the worst miscalculation and the coffee is weak,

This is the worst.

Slops!

Slops! Damn it, slops!

And it can’t be fixed.

Sometimes the coffee is way to strong.

I stay with the idea that the coffee is strong enough if you dropped a dime into coffee and you can’t see the dime at the bottom of your cup.

Why you would drop a dime into your coffee, well, I digress.

My brother Tim told me that with my coffee, the dime dissolves.

Then there are those mornings.

Those mornings when I know the night before, I messed up and guessed how much coffee to put in.

And the coffee that morning is not too weak, it is not too strong.

The coffee is right.

Just right.

When that happens, my day starts with this thought.

THIS IS JUST RIGHT, BUT HOW MUCH COFFEE DID I USE?

Oh gosh.

wretched but better
in general, than used to be
some progress on earth

As you might have guessed I am talking about instant coffee.

As luck would have it, the Late Great Jim Harrison used these words to describe instant coffee.

Of late I have discovered the foil tubes of Café Bustelo and find that I agree with Mr. Harrison that while still not quite coffee, instant coffee is better than it used to be and shows some progress.

I have long tried all means of making just ONE CUP of coffee.

From instant to the drip funnels that sit on top of a cup to kuerig and while of these had made progress, nothing is as good as I remember the coffee that my Mom’s old Hamilton Beach percolator made.

It might be memory but that is my gold standard and I have tried everything to make that coffee.

It the right moment, I can smell it.

From what I have read, trying to match anything to a memory is a losing game.

But I try.

Why is it so hard to get a hot, rich single cup of coffee at home with a minimum of fuss.

As I started to write this, I tried to remember how and when it was that I started drinking coffee.

Coffee from the a percolator at our house was only made on the occasion of guests in the house.

At some point the coffee maker showed up and we got one of those but I had been drinking coffee long before that.

I know I was heavily influenced by my reading.

In the book, The Good Shephard, which by the way is a REALLY good book and I wish Tom Hanks had had a chance to read it before he made a movie supposedly based on it, the hero, Captain Krause, is a coffee nut.

Captain Krause drinks not cup after cup, but pot after pot of strong hot BLACK coffee.

Late in the book with some coffee still in the pot, he offers a cup to the officer of deck.

The OD pours a cup and then adds cream and sugar to “reveal the type of man he was.”

Then there were the Hornblower Books.

A series of novels on the life of Horatio Hornblower, a British naval officer during the wars with Napoleon.

Coffee is a theme throughout the 11 books from Hornblower’s first taste as a mishipman to complaining how the late the coffee was brought it his office when he was an Admiral.

Hornblower thought just too hot to drink was not hot enough and he sweetened his coffee to a syrup with cream and spoons of sugar.

The odd aspect to these literary pictures of how to drink coffee is that both of them were written by C. S. Forestor.

Somewhere along the line for some reason, I started drinking coffee.

About that time Maxim freeze dried coffee came on the market and my Dad starting having it around the house.

My Dad also was in on the search for a good single cup of coffee but he was primarily a tea drinker but had many a conversation of one cup coffee makers.

The google says Maxim came out in the 70’s so I must have started drinking it when I was 12 or 13.

And from time to time I would have a cup of coffee.

With lots of sugar and some milk for color but that is when it started.

That’s also when my Dad noticed an odd phenomena.

One Sunday afternoon when I was getting on everyone’s nerves just being more or less myself, my Dad called me into the kitchen.

He had made me a cup of coffee and he told me to sit down and drink it.

My Mom watched this and then gestured my Dad into the next room.

I could hear them talking and the gist of it was that my Mom wanted to know what in the world Dad was doing getting caffeine into my system when I was already driving everyone nuts.

Dad told Mom to just watch me.

He said he wasn’t sure why but he had noticed that when I drank coffee, I calmed down a bit.

He said maybe it was just that it was so hot that I had to be careful (when I was 9 I had managed to spill a tea kettle of boiling water all over my legs but that is another story) and being careful I calmed down.

Or that I would usually prop a book up in front me while I drank and that always seemed to slow me down for a bit as I ventured off into other worlds.

For some reason, my Dad said, it worked.

And it did.

Even though I heard them and knew I was being played, I still drank the coffee and for whatever reason I was better for it.

Often after that, both my parents recommended I take a time out for coffee now and then.

That may even have been the reason we got a Mr. Coffee at home now that I think about it.

So began my coffee habit.

For a good part of my life, I had a pot of coffee in the morning and another at lunch and another after dinner.

Over the years I have had to cut back and now I am down to 2 or 3 cups to start my day and the random cup of instant in the afternoon.

As the Devine One, Sarah Vaughn sang:

I walk the floor and watch the door
And in between I drink
Black coffee.

Sarah Vaughn was once asked why she was called the Devine One.

“Ella Fitzgerald said so,” was the reply and as they say, nuff said.

So me and coffee.

Waiter, Waiter, percolator.

The search for a single good cup of hot coffee at home continues.

It is still wretched but in general better.

There is some progress in the world.

As a post script, years later our first son started Kindergarten.

At his first conference, the teacher described him as well you know, one of those kids with an ‘active bottom.’

He was always in motion.

We talked with the teacher about whether or not he needed something like well, what was it called, Ritalin?

The teacher did not want to make and calls or judgments but she gave us this tip.

The next time he was really really active, try giving him the soda pop called Mountain Dew she said.

With most kids, the caffine would rev them right up.

But, she said, a kid who might be a Ritalin candidate, the caffeine in the pop will calm them right down.

I didn’t say anything at the time.

But I sure did think about it over my next cup of coffee.

waiting, tomorrow
tomorrow and tomorrow
creeps this petty pace

I was not thinking of Ground Hog Day until I noticed the date when I started typing this note into wordpress.

According to wikipedia the tradition of Ground Hog day as a prediction on winter’s length can be traced back to the 16th century.

In my lifetime, Ground Hog Day has also taken on the modern folklore of an repeating cycle of days due to the 1993 movie Ground Hog Day.

I never liked the movie of at least maybe never liked the role played by Andie MacDowell or maybe I just don’t care for Andie MacDowell.

I was bit shocked to read in wikipedia that, “In the years since its release, the film has grown in esteem and is often considered to be among the greatest films of the 1990s and one of the greatest comedy movies ever. “

Maybe being considered one of the great movies of the 1990’s is more of a comment on the ’90s than on the movie itself.

According to Rolling Stone Magazine, the top ten movies of the decade of the 90’s is:

Good fellas
Hoop Dreams
Safe
The Silence of the Lambs
Pulp Fiction
Close-Up
Slacker
Malcolm X
Chungking Express
The Piano

Such a list reminds me that the Academy Awards make a Best Picture each year no matter what.

I love to compare the list of nominated movies for any given year.

Take 1939, considered the greatest year in the history of Hollywood.

These movies were nominated for BEST PICTURE.

Gone with the Wind
Dark Victory
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
Love Affair
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Ninotchka
Of Mice and Men
Stagecoach
The Wizard of Oz
Wuthering Heights

Then take 2010 and this list of movies.

The King’s Speech
127 Hours
Black Swan
The Fighter
Inception
The Kids Are All Right
The Social Network
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter’s Bone

I mean someone has to win and with 10 movies to vote for, win with 11% of the vote.

But I digress.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

In the 1993 movie, the hero’s day replays itself over and over until he gets it right and wins the girl.

As Yogi Berra would say Deja Vu all over again.

My Haiku is taken from the famous speech in the play Macbeth, written by William Shaekspeare.

Big Bill has his villain Macbeth review all his problems and he come out with one of the great “GEE WHIZ BUT WHATS IT ALL ABOUT” laments of all time.

Over and over and over again and for what?

Waiting and waiting and waiting for change.

Waiting for that next shoe to drop.

Waiting to get on with it.

Is there a better speech for today?

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle!
Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.