I love coffee. Have I mentioned before that I love coffee? I love coffee. I love coffee from a bowl -- a coffee-appropriate bowl. If you try to drink coffee from a regular cereal bowl you will likely lose your fingerprints. I drink my espresso drinks from the latte-appropriate bowls that my sister Lucy gave me for Christmas a few years ago -- see the pic. I have a set of six perfect thick bowls each in its own perfect hue.I'm pretty sure my first bowl of coffee experience was in Europe fifteen years ago when I was a globetrotting (well, more accurately, continenttrotting) college student. Years later I enjoyed the first of an unfortunate few café au laits from Café Fanny in Berkeley, California. Just looking at the pictures on their website makes me want to lick the screen.
There is just something so right about drinking warm coffee and milk from a bowl. It's natural, maybe primal. I could never bring myself to drink the discolored, leftover cereal milk (David just doesn't understand), and yet I'll drink any kind of caffeine concoction out of a bowl.
In grad school I had some problems with caffeine. The nurse practitioner that I was seeing at the "health" center for some mild chest pain I had been experiencing casually asked me if I drank pop. She snuck the question in somewhere between "when was your last period" and "do you use recreational drugs." Pop? Not so much. Before I nearly eradicated it from my life, David and I had switched to "super unleaded" Coke -- diet, caffeine-free. After a couple of years of that I started to wonder why the hell I was bothering. No, the pop follow-up question is what stopped me in my tracks,
"Do you drink coffee?"
"Yes."
"How many cups a day?"
"Well, let's see, how many cups are there in a triple latte?"
"How many triple lattes?"
"Well, how many triple lattes do you think you can get out of a half-gallon of milk?"
You see, my Dearest One had become my supreme enabler at that point in my coffee life. David bought me an espresso maker for Christmas. I could make lattes (never really could work up enough foam for cappuccinos) until I ran out of milk. It turns out that stress and lots and lots of lattes don't really mix well -- at least for me. I had to make a choice: chest pain or caffeine. Oh, and I had to go for blood pressure checks twice a day for three days which really did not deplete my stress at all.
I actually tried to go cold turkey. It lasted only a few days. I had headaches and the shakes and probably looked like a strung-out junkie. Which is what I was. However, once I got with the program, my chest pain eased up as my caffeine intake went down.
I quieted my nerve endings by moving to a moderated schedule of "normal" caffeine dosages. It took some work, but I slowly learned to say the words "Decaf, please. No, no really! I'm not kidding" when I frequented my favorite cafes. Blasphemy!
I have learned that I enjoy the smell of coffee, the color of coffee, the flavor of coffee, and the feel of some suitable container of coffee in my hand almost as much as I love the caffeine. And so, I have been controlling my caffeine intake for many years now.
Dave has moved from being an enabler to being the controller of the caffeine. We buy beans in bulk and keep them in the freezer -- a big bag of decaf and a big bag of caf. He then mixes the beans in various ratios and puts the mix in a small tin near the coffee maker. I don't know how much caffeine I've ingested each morning until I get to work.
Come to think of it, in a lot of ways, Dave is my dealer.
The start of this all, then, was the picture above. The other day, I enjoyed an afternoon fix on our tiny porch surrounded by my boxes of flowers. Caffeine, the outdoors, and wireless internet -- this junkie's favorite fix.
