Column: Love in the time of coffee

“I’m not ashamed to tell the world, I’m in love with a man and his name is Mister Coffee!”
-Jennifer Haubrich, Humor in the Middle, Substack

When I was a kid, my uncle visited on Saturday mornings to chat with Mom and drink coffee. Sometimes his knocks woke us. Other times, Mom was already in her housecoat, prepping the morning’s first purrs of percolation, anticipating a big brother’s arrival and a first cup of coffee, a new day announced not by a neighbor’s cock crowing but by the burble and boil of bean. 

What they talked about, I had no clue. Small, river town news most likely. Not news of the world. Imported coffee was as global as our town got. Likely, they rehashed hardscrabble childhoods: siblings too young to legally drive yet seemingly bred to be designated drivers, ensuring that their rough-and-tumble parents made it safely (and without arrest) during a tasting tour of the county’s taverns; the barfights, more often than not, instigated by their mother (she wore red lipstick as if it were war paint, each finished beer representing the shortening of a fuse inching toward a powder keg); a gun entering the scene during a game of euchre gone dirty, card cheats amongst card cheats, truck cab gun racks emptied in parking lots; the children steering them homeward once the drunken dot-to-dot puzzle was completed, ultimately revealing the heart of a Saturday night barely beating. 

I was too wrapped up in Scooby-Doo to really care about goings-on in the adjacent kitchen. Daphne was a real dish. I was jealous of orange ascot-wearing, all-American type Fred Jones—and still am. I assumed Freddie and Daphne were a couple. I always hoped one of the ghouls, or fake ghouls, would kill Freddie. No one died on Saturday mornings. Such a shame. Odd how my roots of jealousy originate from animated characters. 

Our house smelled of the earthiness of coffee and smokes, and the walls shook from my uncle’s cannon blasts of laughter, overpowering my cartoon laugh track, distracting me, sucking me into the kitchen. My uncle had an Ernest Borgnine air about him. A bull’s sturdiness to his physicality. He served in the Navy aboard the USS Intrepid, just after the Korean War but well before Vietnam. A good gap of time to enlist.

Coffee lacked appeal during my single-digit years. The only interesting things coming from a coffee can back then were squirmy red worms dug from the southern Indiana mud and dropped into an empty Maxwell House can carried to the nearest fishing hole.

Thanks to my uncle, coffee scared me—much more than Scooby-Doo.

“You should try a cup,” he’d tease. “Coffee will put hair on your chest.” He’d reveal to us his jungle of chest hair—our own Wolf Man in the making—and his ballistic laughter further tested our home’s foundation. He was an intrepid vessel of verbal shock value. During large family gatherings, as the beer count increased, he seemed to morph, before my very eyes, into a malevolent pinball: He loved blinking the lights, triggering beeps and buzzers, attracting attention. In the China shop of conversation, he was the proverbial bull, a bully.

I raced to the safety of Scooby-Doo, worried I might sprout chest hairs just by virtue of having been so near my coffee-swigging, hairy-chested uncle. I hoped to never be around him during a full moon. The last thing I needed at 7 was chest hair drawing the unwanted attention of bullies at the public pool. No way would I drink coffee.

Mom once told me it was commonplace to drink coffee when they were toddlers. A warped version of Vitamin C. There was never milk in the family fridge. Plenty of beer, though. No wonder my uncle had accumulated such a shock of chest hair. It must’ve affected only the male side of the family, for each time we swam at Saddle Lake, there was no chest hair to be seen when Mom sported a modest bathing suit. For this, I was relieved. I’m sure she was too.

I didn’t start drinking coffee until my late 30s. Just after my divorce, I bought a four-cup Mr. Coffee maker as a symbol of my declaration of independence. I soon realized women liked coffee shops. Online matches sometimes resulted in meeting up for the first time in the safety of coffee shops (to dazzling affect sometimes, but more often than not, my amorous ambitions were indefinitely grounded). 

You can learn in-depth things about a new person during coffee and conversation, compared to, say, during Jell-O shots and jaw-jacking. No one tells lies during coffee or seems compelled to impress. Coffee is truth serum. I soon fell in love . . . with coffee and with a coffee cup-wielding woman as well. Coffee became more than daily routine, it became daily deliverance. I soon craved the glow of a bean buzz. Currently, I drink two or three cups a day. I doubt I could live a day without jolts of Java. My splendid addiction.

Throughout the past 20-some years, I still haven’t developed chest hair despite my uncle’s forewarning. I guess I became hostage to coffee too late in life. Wouldn’t it be great, though, if coffee actually sprouted hair, not on torsos, but on bald heads like mine? If this were so, I’d take it intravenously in reclamation of my stolen, carefree days of wind-swept hair.

My wife, Brynne, likes coffee. I don’t see how a marriage can survive in a home divided between coffee lovers and coffee deniers. Things ultimately worked out quite nicely during my post-divorce love in the time of coffee phase. It helps that my baldness doesn’t bother Brynne. In turn, I don’t make a fuss or raise awareness about her chest hair.  

As Buck Owens used to sing, “Pour me another cup of coffee.” Black. No cream. No sugar. Cheers.

(Subscribe for free to Scott’s Substack page, or email him at scottsaalman@gmail.com)