It’s the smell that hits me first. The beans, the wafting aroma of a fresh early-morning roast -- these things are heavenly, and when I walk into a breakfast diner or the office breakroom, I wish I still drank coffee. A cup o’ Joe, in my estimation, is the third best way for a person to start their day. Scratching off a winning lottery ticket and eating a bacon-laced Pop-Tart come in one and two, respectively.
As things stand, I don’t get to enjoy this treat as often as I’d like. A chronically inconsistent sleeper, I made a decision years ago to forego all forms of caffeine, which was probably a good decision from a health standpoint but still ranks as a major-league bummer. That’s the way life goes sometimes. One by one you give up all of your little pleasures, until eventually your daily routine consists of getting up, doing five squat-thrusts, drinking a bottle of Ensure and then going back to bed with an electric massager and a tube of Ben Gay.
When I was still a broncin’ buck, a day wasn’t a day without at least one bubbling brew. Looking back, my coffee fixation was complete insanity; it would perk me up for precisely three hours before I came crashing down hard, eyelids shuttered like weighted window shades as I stumbled through life in a bovine stupor. By four o’clock I’d have barely enough energy to floss my teeth. Good thing I never flossed my teeth.
The flavor is what kept me hooked. Oh, the flavor. Especially in my teens, coffee tasted grownup somehow, like it contained a secret formula that would make my beard thicker and my voice deeper. Neither one of these things happened; my beard is just barely viable, and my voice vacillates between a normal mid-range and the high-pitched squeals of a prepubescent carnival barker. That didn’t stop me from quaffing it in prodigious amounts, feeling mature and important with my piping hot Tazmanian Devil mug.
My decision to quit coffee was well-timed. Self-proclaimed “high-end” outlets like Starbucks were beginning to take off, heralding a new, magnified era of coffee culture and obsession. You can’t simply enjoy a cup anymore. You’ve got to know your roasts, and your beans, and be particular about your cream-and-sugar dosage, and stay up-to-date on what the trends are in India, and know the secret handshake so you don’t get ridiculed at the counter and pelted with doughnuts. The coffee drinkers are all gone, replaced by “enthusiasts” who follow this stuff like science geeks follow particle physics. Except particle physics are simpler.
Having been removed from the scene for so long, stepping into a high-end coffee shop feels like walking onto the deck of the Starship Enterprise: There are lots of shiny objects, and I don’t know what any of them do. Even the language is foreign. For various reasons I often feel like I was born in the wrong era, and this is exacerbated when I’m assaulted by all this newfangled lingo; can you imagine Humphrey Bogart or Cary Grant bellying up the bar in a 1940s whodunnit and ordering an iced mochaccino? They wouldn’t even know what it is. Bogart would toss it in the dumpster after realizing it’s devoid of brandy.
If social media is any indication, we live in a society that loves to proclaim its affinity for the “simple things.” Yet something so simple as coffee is now more complex than the assembly instructions for a Schwinn 12-speed. More and more, the choice to forego this national obsession feels like a wise one, sparing me the need to take intensive graduate courses so I can pass muster ordering a decaf cappuccino. This is a gross generalization, but the bearded coffee-slingers behind the counter seem way too hip for me, patiently enduring my uninformed requests on the few occasions when I break down and enjoy a cup. The whole scene has passed me by. Who knows, if I’d kept up the habit I might now be sporting a man-bun and humming sax lines from John Coltrane jams.
“Habit,” by the way, is definitely the word for it. Caffeine is an addictive drug, and while you won’t find any dark roast connoisseurs squirming through detox at a rehab facility, it can sink its teeth into us nonetheless. I once worked with a woman who’d get withdrawal headaches if she didn’t grab her daily dose of Starbucks. Not a home-brewed beverage brought to work in a thermos; Starbucks, which charges so much per cup you’d think it came with a college education and a subscription to Better Homes and Gardens. Five days a week, 52 weeks a year. You could buy your own golf cart for that kind of money.
As a person who truly does appreciate the simple things, I miss starting each day with a hot mug in my hands. If nothing else, its wafting aroma is a welcome addition to the classic mélange of early-morning smells -- bacon, hot toast, fresh juniper through an open window. Pleasures like that don’t necessarily need a clutch of accessories and a lifestyle to match. They just need to be. Which is why, when I walk into a diner and breathe deeply, I’m transported to a time when the a.m. hours had their own texture and personality, punctuated by our need for physical comforts. Giving it up was hard. Sometimes it still is.
But oddly, there’s comfort in the fact that somewhere people are drinking it, ridiculous obsessions notwithstanding. Cassandra Clare in “City of Ashes” said it best: “As long as there was coffee in the world, how bad could things be?”
No comments:
Post a Comment