Been thinking about…coffee breaks

May sunshine filters through rich farm house curtains and new wooden blinds. Outside, the pear trees are brilliant greens, glossy in the afternoon. Inside, rich colors, soft textures of an Oriental rug, and slanting sun all but dim against reds and creams and blues. The espresso machine is purring, droplets of thick, rich, black coffee plopping into my 30-year-old Dakota Pheasant mug. The coffee smell is precise and warm, but echoing another time, deep contrast to the aliveness of this space. I feel my bare feet upon the rug and sigh strange gratitude for the passage of time, the opportunity to live beyond some moments long ago.

Summer sun is heavy through thick tinted windows of a west-facing waiting room. The pulmonary floor is too clinical of a place to smell like nutty black coffee, but here we are nonetheless. Around the corner, a break room for staff and worried family members. Orange juice, apple juice, styrofoam cups, individually wrapped snacks, little cartons of two percent in the refrigerator, and always a pot of black coffee, any time day or night. Outside, green grass and baseball and a whole wide open world in which to live. But not here, not inside. Inside, the world stops breathing. The closest thing here to the real world is the smell of the black coffee and the worn magazines stacked on all four end tables, bookending uncomfortable black seating, magazines filled with brilliantly colored people full of too much life to ever be in a place like this.

It is best not to estimate the countless gallons of coffee I’ve drunk in, say, the last 35 years, but just the same, I know it’s a lot. Believe it or not, coffee drinking did not come naturally to me. Too bitter for my taste, but I loved the smell. Even more so, I loved the idea. Endeavoring to manhood takes strange paths. On that cusp between child and adult, our minds reach for tangible symbols to guide the way. For some, it could be whiskey, or cigarettes, or a set of car keys. For me, a cup of cheap, black, bitter instant coffee. We never had expensive coffee in the house. We had the cheapest instant coffee from Aldi, circa 1989. I still remember the red plastic screw-off lid and the garish yellow paper wrapper.

We have heroes, ideally, when growing up. Those to which we aspire. Those to which we look up. Those we want to be accepted by. Moral compasses, guides, mentors, exemplars. For 12-year-old me, that was my mom and my sister. Quiet, strong, aware, with more common sense between the two of them than much of the rest of the world combined. And they wore worn flannel shirts and practical blue jeans and muddy cowboy boots and always sat at the kitchen table and drank bitter black instant coffee. I wanted to be just like them both. By 13, I was setting my alarm for six o’clock in the morning so I could practice drinking coffee when no one would see me wince. Tenacity paid off. In a couple weeks I was sitting at the kitchen table, mid-morning, drinking coffee with my mom. I think I was even wearing a worn-out flannel shirt.

The afternoon sun is still heavy in the pulmonary waiting room. From a back magazine cover, Mark McGwire is reminding me to drink milk. There is yet aliveness beyond the windows, out where birds can fly and the smell of cut grass is thick and beautiful. Here, machines are beeping and the future is narrowed down to a diagnosis, and the next round of doctors, sometime before noon tomorrow. I am jealous of the nurses. They can clock out and leave this reality behind. My bag of school books mocks me from an uncomfortable black couch. This is not the time or place in which I can focus on high school geometry.

Thirty years gone in the blink of an eye. I start from this particular May reverie, cup of espresso steaming in my hand. Oriental rug is soft beneath my bare feet. Time has come and gone. A once-future is now the past. Loss I thought once unendurable now is history, yet somehow the space in which I exist is good, even alive. Still, the smell is the same, and it is as though I exist in all three places at once. Uncharacteristically, this time I reach for the cream.