Thoughts Over Coffee
Monday, January 19th, 2009
The day brewed to life with hissing and wet snaps coming from a corner in the kitchen. Before anyone stirred, the coffee maker was putting on a show, its levees and cogs turning, the water dripping through the ground beans and working out a hazlenut flavor in the straining. The sun was an idea when the percolating began, a faint warming in the windows as the color changed from black to purple to blue and all the gradients in the short time that the first pot was ready. By the time the coffee was made dark and lined at the 10 ring, it was as though the sun ran through a day-starter there on the countertop with an aroma sweeter than the scent the Earth puts on in May.
I am not particular about the coffee I drink. Black is good. Cream is good. Sometimes sugar. Any combination works. I drink it for the temporary lift and when I start to come down, I drink it to take me back to the lost high. The flavor is not important – it’s optional. I started the addiction on purpose last spring so I could get more writing done and because the house was so damn cold and we couldn’t afford to keep it warmer. Only recently did I realize that some writers believed a dependency on caffeine or any other drug can sterilize the feeling in your work. Brenda Euland claims in If You Want to Write that you can try to write emotionally under the influence, but coffee and even cigarettes dilute the honesty behind it.
The choice seems to be between fewer – possibly incomplete, but more heartfelt – words, or more words and finished stories, but rendered with lesser meaning. I am not sure which is worse, so I choose the more complicated: downing my coffee with some risk. I made my decision. I’d rather see the words come through quaky fingers and go sleepless than let them be kept stagnate and unshaped in my mind.
During week days, I drink pot after pot. I start in about 8 a.m. On weekends, I drink enough to prevent a headache, but no more. Time can be spent on Saturdays and Sundays watching the water spit and boil. Those sounds usually lead me to boil eggs. By the sink, I stand and drink and eat my breakfast. Between a few flowerpots on the window sill swept with children’s paint strokes, I can see a lawn ravaged by dogs. Their paw prints are frozen solid in the spots where the grass has been uprooted. A system of trails has been worn down from gate to gate marked by wide, brown strips, uneven at the edges, leading from the deck, all around the fencerow. Holes have been dug in a few places along the fences where the posts have been cemented into the ground. These are the places where the dogs can elude the wind in winter. During the summer, they dig all new holes where the grond is cool against their bare stomachs.
Small sips make the vision more acceptable. I drink and take things in, the children at the table eating, me a few feet away lost. I try to cast poetic visions on what I see. The coffee is great fuel for creativity. I disagree with Ms. Euland. I can be heartbreaking on caffeine. Words can come out true and real whenever the person writing means them. Now, more than half a day removed from the moment but still coffee drunk and tea drunk, too, a little test should prove it.
After two days home with the children, they ask me – practically beg me – to stay home and go the museum with them. The museum is a living history exhibit 20 minutes away on a university campus. I tell them, no, I can’t go. I have to work. I won’t see them for any steady time until the weekend and though I’ve taken a different path in my life than my father, they get the same treatment – me, not there, and them all laughs and joy with their mother. They ask for her when they are sick or hurt. I drive away in my car listening to sports talk to take my mind off what Im leaving behind. Past empty fileds and skies turning colors, I look for beautiful visions to write about that draw me closer to the land and who I am so my life will have meaning, so that I might leave something behind that they respect. A talent. The meaning is over my shoulder and I know it.
I hope that was heartfelt. I feel a deep pit my stomach as I write. Here in the morning, sipping a cup, looking into Caroline’s face and Charlie’s face, hearing the voices that are more disappointed than sad, which is the saddest of all. The coffeemaker would be drown out my sobbing if only I wasn’t so gone on coffee that I couldn’t feel a thing.
