three cups of coffee
warm brown and caffeine filled
starting the morning

He poured himself a cup of coffee, fumbling in the darkness, and sipped at it. Scalding hot, too hot to drink despite its long journey up from the wardroom. But the taste and the smell of it were sufficient to start his digestive processes working again. He longed for that coffee; he was accustomed to drinking eight big cups every day of his life and had always guiltily put aside the self-accusation that he was a coffee-hound dependent on a drug.

It was coffee; the inevitable set-up with the cream and sugar that he never used, but he viewed it as Galahad would have viewed the Holy Grail. Krause tugged off his gloves and snatched at it. His hands were numb and trembled a little as he poured: He swigged off the cup and refilled and drank again. The warmth as the coffee went down called his attention to the fact that he was cold; not acutely, perishingly, cold but chilled through and through as if nothing would ever quite warm him again.

Then a third cup of coffee, not swigged down madly like the first two, but drink more at leisure, savouring it like a true coffee-hound, with the added pleasure of knowing that there was a fourth cup yet to be drunk.

From The Good Shepard by CS Forester (Little, Brown: Boston, 1955).

A couple of days every week I work in the office which, for me, means getting up at 6 a.m. to try and get on the road to work around 6:45 a.m. and beat the traffic.

Goofy to say as I moved from Metro Atlanta with 10 million people to a seaside community with a scattered 100,000 people but we still have traffic problem and the problem is that almost everyone lives in one part of the county but works out on the coast island and we all go to work at the same time and there is only one bridge to the island.

Most days I get up at 7 a.m. and me and coffee and my morning reading of newspapers on my tablet have a comparatively leisurely start.

But when I am in the office, I get my clothes out the night before, I plan my lunch and I get the coffee ready.

Café Bustelo and the timer set for 5:45 a.m.

I wake up before the alarm and here the gurgling of the coffee maker and into the shower where I expect to have gallons of HOT FRESH WATER delivered to me at the touch of a hand – if that doesn’t set the USA off from 95% of the world … well, boy howdy!

Then out to the kitchen and my mug and the first sip.

The warmth as the coffee went down

Then a third cup of coffee, not swigged down madly like the first two, but drink more at leisure, savouring it like a true coffee-hound, with the added pleasure of knowing that there was a fourth cup yet to be drunk.

I pour that fourth cup too.

As I get squared away, keys, sun glasses, back pack … I look at that fourth cup sitting on the counter.

I put aside the self-accusation that he was a coffee-hound dependent on a drug and know that I might get caught in traffic without access to a bathroom and I leave it there.