“Can you
bring me some coffee?” In this life I’m
wobbling through, that’s probably the most terrifying question I’ve ever been
asked. Only by God’s grace can I make
such a declaration, but those words struck a fear in me the likes to which I
have no comparison. He had been my
boyfriend for a month, and he asked for coffee.
That was over a decade ago, but it feels and smells like yesterday. We
were both too old to use words like “boyfriend.” We were both too old to use a lot of words,
but I was way too inexperienced to ever be sent to the store to get
coffee.
I remember
buying a coffee pot for my dorm room because I thought that was something we
were supposed to have. I tried to drink
it. I loved the smell of it. I got plum crafty with the grind, and those
of you who were my family in Dupree can just keep all that to yourselves. Don’t make me tell the Ouija board
stories. Forward.
My mom
always had coffee brewing at home when I was a kid, and my WoWo (term for best
grandmother ever who could rock a set of pin curls like a diva on the cover of Vogue) always had a coffee pot full of
water on her coal and wood stoves. The
containers were always around, and for some reason, I thought the contents were
important. When I got old enough to
share a dorm room with Steph (who deserves a Nobel prize for doing so), I
thought I should perk up and drink up.
Now, at forty-two, I wonder what else children pick up just by
watching. No one ever offered me a
sip. No one ever told me I couldn’t have
it. The coffee was there, and when I got
all grown up, I wanted the same.
I was all
grown up by age twenty-one. All grown
up. In the stages of human development
that I studied in college, that’s the stage all the great psychological minds
forgot to discuss. This is the point in
my blog where I’d insert some famous quote from a beautiful mind who studied
human development, but I’m not going to do that. I’d cheat and copy and paste it from the
Internet, and you’d have a false sense of my intelligence. It would look like I remembered it from some
great work I read, when we all know the only book I can quote besides the Holy Bible is To Kill a Mockingbird and maybe the complete comic series of Calvin and Hobbes. See, when I was all grown up, my ears stopped
working, my mouth went into overdrive, and my mind lost all sense of
reason. It’s a common human condition,
but I think my case of all grown up lasted a lot longer than other people who
shared my chronological age. My case of
all grown up should have stayed hot for about the same amount of time as a cup
of coffee, but it just lingered until the brew got plum moldy. In fact, I am pretty sure that today is my
last day of being all grown up. I think
tomorrow I might just enter the age of plain old grown.
Do you know
Phaedra Parks? I’ve never met her, but
she’s on (not as in sitting upon but as in performing in) The Real Housewives of Atlanta, and she is by far my favorite
feisty peach. She loves to say,
“Everybody knows…..” while she looks at the camera like we’re all idiots
because we don’t know. She makes me
laugh, and I think she’d say, “Everybody knows when the weatherman says ‘snow,’
we go to the grocery store in the South.”
Amen.
Articles
have been published in bulk about that mystic behavior we demonstrate when we
hear the “s” word. Conspiracies have
been derived to claim that the weatherman is in cahoots with dairy farmers to
provoke a sell out of milk and eggs. The
mere grain of the earth is chopped down to the nub all for the sake of a loaf
of Wonder Bread because there may never be another. Honey, I run right to the store with the rest
of you, and that’s the only time you’ll ever see me run. Even if something is ever chasing me, I’ll
let it catch me. It won’t keep me
long. Kind of like catching what my
papaw (the diva’s husband) called a gar fish.
Big ol’ fish. Teeth for days. After he caught it, he’d wrinkle up his nose
and throw it back. Even though I’m
officially one tooth short of a full set compared to a gar, ain’t nothing gonna
keep me if I get caught. But the one
thing you’ll never ever catch me buying is coffee even if the next blizzard is
coming.
So, here I
am past the all grown up stage, snuggling into the grown stage of life, and
there shall be no coffee in my hand, in my car, or in my home. For as long as I live, I will remember the
day he called and said, “Can you bring me some coffee?” and the fear that
followed it. I borrowed the attached
photo from that Interweb. Just stare at
that picture for a minute. The brands
are too numerous to count. The prices
are too varied to justify. The
containers are so diverse that an elementary teacher could make a learning
center out of every single empty one.
The smells either make me nauseous or make me want to kiss someone on
the lips. Picking out coffee for someone
I had only been kissing on the lips for two weeks…maybe a month…maybe a
summer…. was way too much pressure for me even when I was all grown up. I couldn’t ask what kind he wanted because I
was too cool for that. I was all grown
up and all grown up people know that about others. I couldn’t buy decaffeinated because that
could be insulting to his well being. I
couldn’t buy the beans because I didn’t know if he had a grinder, and I
couldn’t buy the instant because I didn’t know if it went in a pot or not. I know I stood in that aisle for half an hour
trying to make a decision that I was certain would determine my future from
that day forward. See, when you’re all
grown up, that’s what your brain does.
Today, I
heard a colleague mention that she had checked the NOAA website. That is all I have to hear. Doesn’t matter what television station you
pull up, what newspaper, or what airport you call to get the weather report. When a teacher says she’s pointing and clicking
with NOAA, you know someone has said, “snow.”
My colleague said NOAA and my brain thought, “FOOD!” I putted on down the road to the grocery
store and grabbed up enough goods to get me through a blizzard or the 0.05 inch
of snow we might stand a 10% chance of getting tonight. But tonight and every other time I have to
brave up and go to the grocery store, I stop in the coffee aisle and just stare
at all those choices. I’ve never bought
coffee again since, and I’m pretty sure I bought the right kind when I was
asked to do so. Once is more than
enough.
