"Coffee, My Brother, I Salute Thee."

When I started not to like sweets such as Now-and-Laters and Nerds (okay, every now and then I still do) I knew that my taste buds must be undergoing some kind of metamorphosis. Were my taste buds, like my hair, turning gray? Suddenly I could no longer drink orange juice without cutting it with water first. And drinking the juice from a can of peaches, while it used to be so grand, was almost torture by sugar shock. Even as I pause in the writing of this, I'm taking the frosting off a brownie Marian served me (heated up, with ice cream, ain't I a king?).

I like to think that my sense of taste has matured. One other sign is that I now drink coffee after 34 years of NEVER drinking it. I mean, I always thought that coffee tasted like a mud puddle. In Kiribati, I could never drink the stuff because they always mixed into their coffee pot about a gallon of condensed milk. I always teased Marian's principal, a Kiribati woman of about 50, "Would you like a bit more coffee with your sugar?" Even if they had not sugared it up so, I still wouldn't have liked the instant Pablo, an Australian staple that tasted like a pinch of outback mixed with kangaroo pee.

See, I've become a coffee snob. Perhaps it was parenthood (read: not near enough sleep) that got me wanting a lift in the morning, some kind of ritual that my daughter could not co-opt. I mean, she steals my silverware, my napkin, and even my food, often placing one or more of these items in my water glass when I'm not looking. But my coffee is DANGEROUS, so she can't get near it. "Daddy's hot-cuppa-KO-fee," she dutifully recites, giving appropriate ground to my grounds.

My grandfather used to drink a pot of coffee every morning from a cup that looked like it been hewn from marble by Michelangelo and had been damaged by a multitude of European and American tourists over the course of four centuries. It had a tremendous number of long cracks but somehow did not leak. It appeared, when empty, to weigh a little over four pounds, and was bigger than a small child's head.

Now I know why Roy liked that cup. It had a thickness that kept the heat in and a smoothness that helped the coffee to enter his mouth at just the right velocity. Drinking a pot of coffee is, after all, a race between you and the morning, because you wouldn't want to be drinking it past noon. Someone might think you had a coffee drinking problem.

That was my mom's dad. My dad's family put honey in their coffee. Not my favorite way of sweetening coffee, to be honest with you. But they came from a long line of farmers and I wouldn't be surprised if honey was the main sweetener they used back in the 19th century.

I used to work for a guy whose alarm in the morning was me grinding the coffee beans at five minutes past seven. These days, I grind coffee for me and Marian. It is a terrible noise that Stella and I used to dance to because she thought that was pretty funny. Eventually she could no longer be fooled into thinking it is music so now she screams, "Very very LOUD!" when I grind the beans in front of her.

This morning we didn't have any beans left so I had to buy my coffee at the only "to go" coffee place on Highway 19 - the Sunoco next to Ferguson's. They actually have quite a bit to choose from, but I'm not going to say what I chose is anything to write home about. Certainly better than nothing, and enough to get me past my coffee jonesing moment today.

What bums me out is that Breuggher's, which has such great bagels, has pretty terrible coffee, if you ask me.

Some of the best coffee I've had I brought back from Jamaica, where Marian's brother married. My sister (who had honeymooned there) gave me $40 to buy a lot of Blue Mountain coffee and bring it home. It was about $17 per pound at the resort but maybe $5 a pound one of the little souvenir shops run by locals. I think half the weight I brought home consisted of these little burlap bags of coffee. It was good stuff.

I don't have much else to say about coffee, or to coffee, except maybe to walk up to it and say, "Thanks, Bro'. You've helped me get by."