A Coffee-Stained Life

The first English course I took was a rhetoric class with a theme that semester: reading and writing about food.

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Writing & Rhetoric I
Essay #1: Writing to Explore the Self
September 27, 2007
First Draft

A COFFEE-STAINED LIFE


It's a divine ritual: measured amount of coffee beans; the proper grind; good water; correct temperature—rolling, but not boiling. After brewing, give it a few minutes to settle. Then draw a mug three-quarters full. Heavy splash of cream. Sit and ponder things, or set my pen to paper—usually a café napkin—to externalize the thoughts in my head and heart. The basics of my ritual.

I take another sip of coffee and stare out the window. It's snowing so hard I can't see across the street. A little after four in the afternoon and the static whiteness of the blizzard is fading to a pewter gray. I've been sitting here in the bookstore since eight this morning with pots of coffee and zero customers. It's almost time to call it a day. Finish performing this ritual.

Pouring another cup of coffee, I watch the steam swirling as it rises from the dark surface. I pour cream in and watch the spinning liquid cloud, changing shades from black to seal to bistre to sepia. Albino coffee, I call it. A lot of cream.

When I take my seat back by the window and hear the fingernail tapping of icy wind on the glass, I take a sip and taste the slipstream rush of history, culture, warmth and possibility. The sacred bean; the devil's cup.

I never knew—never thought about—how the history of human civilization and coffee were so closely linked, I never considered the links of history and the beans—the pits of the berry—of the coffee plant were so tightly joined together. Not before walking into this small bookstore in this tiny tourist town and asking for a job.

West Yellowstone, Montana. The aptly named town at the west gate of Yellowstone National Park. Small town, seven hundred people in year-round population. In summertime the town would grow to about two thousand, and more than a million tourists would come through over the five months of summer season. In the winter, the population dropped, and, other than snowmobilers and a handful of cross-country skiers, the tourism was significantly less as well.

The bookstore and café was a family-run operation, a father, his son, and daughter (the mother recently passed away). I really just wanted to work in the bookstore, but when I asked for work, I was told that they only hired people to help out in the café. The back corner of the store had a slight rise and hardwood floor surrounding a wooden bar and several tall chairs in front. Espresso machine and a selection of bakery items; house special, baklava muffins.

"Ever work in a café before?" I was asked.

"No," I replied with a sarcastic grin, "But I have been to Seattle."

My irreverent humor and quick wit fit in well there and I was soon asked if I wanted to learn more and work in their coffee house.

Indeed I did.

I learned the difference from light roast to full city to French roasts. I learned that the temperature of the water meant everything in brewing. I also found out that humidity in the air can alter the pull of espresso and make it too strong or too weak. I learned that Lloyd's of London, the worldwide insurance company, began in Edward Lloyd's Coffeehouse in London more than a hundred years ago. I learned that western European coffeehouses may have never been introduced to coffee if the Ottoman Turks hadn't unsuccessfully attacked Vienna in 1683, and that many people from Seattle carry the attitude that Starbucks invented espresso.

Having always been fascinated with history—not the sort of sterile history a high school teacher attempts to illustrate with dates and place names associated with nothing relevant to the human lives involved with such events, but the sort of breathing history that is brought about by familiar people doing familiar things in a time and space other than now—I had more than a few moments of satori and giddy enlightenment in learning not only how to roast and grid and brew coffee, but also its place in relation to people through time.

I suppose part of my smitten attraction to coffee was that I felt transported by it, to places and times I hadn't considered before. The smell and taste and entire atmosphere of the beverage. The handling and surroundings of it could influence how it affected me (and thus, most likely, others as well).

The finest cup of coffee, the character of the room in which it was served. I came to want to create the perfect cup of coffee, the perfect setting in which to drink it.

And being a bookstore café, I felt doubly at home when I would bring in a freshly-roasted bag of coffee and begin the detailed, but not complicated, process of sublimating beans into dark liquid. I thought of it as alchemy. The mythic process of turning lead into gold.

But what I was learning was the sublimation of something greater than coffee and water. I was transforming myself.

I wanted to work in a bookstore because I love stories, learning about other times, other places, other lives. In working with coffee, I opened into an awareness of times and places—fires in the Persian desert with Sufi poets, Vienna at the dawn of its enlightened age, fin de siècle Paris, a burned-out café in a besieged Sarajevo at both ends of the twentieth century—the connection between the past, the present, and future possibility. Recurring cycles, which are played out in a similar manner over and over again.

I came to construct a defining ritual in my life. Coffee. Awareness. Creativity. I had become inspired. In awe of the most evident things hide the most glorious details that are all-too-easily overlooked: fractured shafts of light scattered through the leaves of the tallest tree in the forest; the warmth of the ground under barefeet on a summer's day; a strand of hair caught in the eyelash of a lover as they blink; the sky on fire at sunset after another wondrous ordinary day. The little things that sometimes go unnoticed but make up the best things in our lives.

The ritual of preparing coffee, of drinking it. Tasting the rush of history and myth and art and politics and religion and stories that I taste in the finest of sips, and the lingering flavor on my tongue is the potential of what comes next. What do I have to add to this steaming stream of heritage brewed along with coffee?

I find no sense of this in a quickly prepared drink in a paper cup. Hand over a drink and then bustle on to the next person in line. The rite of brewing coffee and sitting down is always a favorable alternative for me. Seated, relaxed, cup in front of me, and a pen spilling its ink across a café napkin as I write another line of poetic tale before taking another sip. Here's a half-written page/from my coffee-stained life, I write on the coffee-stained napkin, then pause to stare out the window at the blizzard blowing snow so hard I can't see across the street. It's been a great day, sitting here in the bookstore with two pots of coffee and no customers.

It's almost time to go, but I'm already home.

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