Coffee

Dinah Lenney

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501344367
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Coffee--it's the thing that gets us through, and over, and around. The thing--the beverage, the break, the ritual--we choose to slow ourselves down or speed ourselves up. The excuse to pause; the reason to meet; the charge we who drink it allow ourselves in lieu of something stronger or scarier. Coffee goes to lifestyle, and character, and sensibility: where do we buy it, how do we brew it, how strong can we take it, how often, how hot, how cold? How does coffee remind us, stir us, comfort us? But Coffee is about more than coffee: it's a personal history and a promise to self; in her confrontation with the hours (with time--big picture, little picture), Dinah Lenney faces head-on the challenges of growing older and carrying on. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

1 THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF THE TASK

Some months ago I was virtually introduced to Dan McCloskey, who founded a company called Premium Quality Consulting.¹ He’s spent “a lifetime in the coffee business,” so says his bio on the website, and the company advises about all manner of industry concerns, local to global, from marketing, to branding, to wholesale operations. Coffee consulting for your biggest challenges [announces the homepage]: what worries you most?

“Dear Dan,” I confided in an email just after a preliminary exchange. “Clearly, I’ve lost my mind.” I explained that I was suddenly having trouble letting anyone else make the coffee. In my kitchen. For two. That just the other morning my husband went to pick up the kettle and I stopped him—rudely—

“Dinah,” Fred said, “I think I know how to pour water.”

And it’s true, he does. Of course he does.

Dan responded generously. As if I hadn’t lost perspective, not to mention a sense of boundaries. (Thank you, Dan.) He referred to the ubiquity of coffees, the clichés, the frustrations (“it’s described with tropes that don’t add up to much under investigation”). Keep in mind, though, he added, “Six out of ten people drink coffee,” and, new paragraph, he wrote, “[Coffee is] a common human experience that doesn’t recognize identity, religion, culture, or position.”

Reassuring, right? And true. Or if not entirely true (there are beans that sell for $50 to $500 a pound²—but who can buy those beans? Who would?), it should be.

Toward the end of his note, Dan said about coffee: “For me, there’s nothing special or innocent left—except every single day when I wake up and have a cup. I rise up into consciousness thinking I can’t possibly face the day and then I have a coffee, the adenosine flushes from my brain, and I’m myself again.” (Note to self at the time: look up adenosine.³)

“You won’t solve coffee,” Dan McCloskey wrote, “so don’t fight the impossibility of the task . . .”

How deflating. I won’t solve coffee. How to deal with the fact that I won’t solve coffee? Or, extending the metaphor, anything else? And time running out, what to do, what next, how to be, why bother, oh no—despair. How to counter this sense of despair? With coffee, that’s how. No really, I mean it, I do.

Notes

1 Their slogan: “In the coffee business, we’ve done it. We’re here for you.”

2 Herewith, a list of ten coffees that go for more than 30 bucks a pound, including Black Ivory coffee, harvested from elephant poop, then roasted and bagged, no kidding around. https://financesonline.com/top-10-most-expensive-coffee-in-the-world-luwak-coffee-is-not-the-no-1/.

3 A naturally occurring molecule produced when the body runs out of fuel. It makes a person want to sleep. Coffee counters that, but: the more coffee we drink, the more adenosine we produce. Too much coffee, too much adenosine, which makes it hard to wake up, which makes us want more coffee . . .

2 MY MOTHER IS COMING, MY MOTHER IS COMING

This, says my son, as if to a third party, as if we’re not the only two in the room, This is a woman (so he has to be speaking to me about me) with a mother complex—

He says this because he hears me muttering to myself about putting the sheets through one more wash (because they’re new! Because I want them to be soft!)—and because I’m fussing, moving a fern from one side of the room to the other and back—

Later, sheets still warm from the dryer, I call from the guest room. Does he want me to teach him to make hospital corners? Big surprise, he does not. “Everyone should know how to make hospital corners,” I shout. “There’s a reason never to learn,” he shouts back.

Is this terrible? I fleetingly wonder. Is it awful that my kids, both of them out of the house with jobs and lives of their own, don’t actually know how to make a bed? It’s because we don’t use top sheets, never did, only the fitted kind on the bottom, and duvets on top—bed-making European-style, right? Bed-making made easy. However. I grew up in a house where the flat top sheet cuffed the blanket just so (was supposed to anyway); and at the bottom, the bed was wrapped like a present, with hospital corners.

And that’s how my mother likes a bed. And my mother is coming, my mother’s idea. Months ago, she called to propose we get tickets to hear something at Disney Hall. And I sensed right away how invested she was, and how wary—braced for me to balk—what if I said no, what if I came up with an excuse. As if I ever would. Still, for her to have to have a reason, an event in the bargain in order to visit her daughter on the other side of the country; to hear that edge of trepidation in her voice: at once, I felt sad and guilty. I should have done the inviting—she’d hinted around and I’d let it slide. Thinking she, too, would let it slide—thinking she didn’t mean it, my mother, who doesn’t much like LA; my mother, who is old and lonely and bewildered—older and lonelier (and bewildered-er) than she cares to admit; and, also hard to admit, we don’t get along very well, she and I, not for more than a couple of days. But such a long trip to take for just a couple of days. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when she suggested we make an exception to the guests-are-like-fish rule. Not a good idea, said I too quickly. You’ll get bored, I said. You’ll get antsy. You don’t like Los Angeles, remember? Then her turn to remind me that travel takes a toll at her age. The time zones, she whimpered. And that’s when I suggested she plan to go north to see my brother for the balance of the week. North to San Francisco, where she’ll stay in a hotel, it’s true. “Why can’t she stay in a hotel in LA?” asks my daughter. Because, I say, she counts on staying here—because I’m the one she can stay with. The one who most upsets her, perhaps, but also the one she’s known longer than just about anyone. We go way back, my mother and I, back before even the second husband (who raised me; for that, I am grateful—to her), and, now that most of her family and friends are dead, who knows her as I do, as long and as well? More to the point, who else wants to please her? Who cares as much what she thinks and whether she approves?¹ As if she ever would approve; as if, as she says, she’s going to perform according to any script other than her own—as if I haven’t learned that by now.

As keen as I am, as hopeful as I am (the elaborate preparation), I do know: by Sunday night I’ll be biting my lip; and Mom? She’ll be tunelessly humming as she does when she’s vastly, or even only slightly annoyed.

However, she is coming. My mother is coming! The bed is a vision, you should see. There’s a good loaf of sourdough in the breadbox, fruit in the bowl, full-fat cottage cheese in the fridge. And—this is especially important—heavy cream, unpasteurized, for her coffee, which is the reason for this whole convolution. It’s coffee-inspired. That glass bottle of cream—that should tell us something. Should tell me something, I mean. My mother will not be impressed with my coffee, not as I dream of her being—

Coffee just isn’t her bag, her thing—cream is. The right kind of cream. A three-minute egg, buttered toast, good preserves (no pectin), fresh orange juice—but coffee? No. See here, the answers from her coffee questionnaire:

When did you start liking coffee?

I have always liked coffee. People tell me that I am not a real coffee lover because real coffee lovers drink it black. I hate black coffee.

But further down she writes: I am very particular about coffee. I would rather have nothing than either lousy coffee or tea. I never have coffee on a plane. Except on European airlines I have never had a decent cup of airborne coffee. ²

And she adds:

I still love Chock Full o’Nuts, spiked for the last fifty or more years with 25 percent French Roast.

See, I know by now (I didn’t always: I happily bought and drank it for decades myself, of course I did—because my mother . . . !), Chock Full o’Nuts isn’t good. Chock is humdrum first wave coffee.³ The stuff Americans (and the rest of the world) have been drinking for generations, the stuff in those vacuum-sealed cans at the grocery store—not the good stuff. Unless you think it is. Unless you love it. In which case, who’s to say you shouldn’t, or you don’t—

Nobody gets to judge the other guy’s coffee—coffee is personal. Coffee is pa...