Whenever I tell people that I have never once consumed a bottle of beer in my entire life, I am met with shock and incredulity. It seems no one can fathom that I have never, ever pushed down a pint, funneled from a keg or even chased a shot of tequila with a Budweiser or a Corona or a Stella Artois. But I haven’t. I grew up in a household that was voluntarily void of alcohol and spirits (unless you include Maneschewitz, but I don’t) and I simply never developed a taste for beer. In fact, I rather loathe it. I also have a particular disdain for the taste of beer on anyone else. Which, as a teenager growing up in a suburb rife with raucous football parties, made for difficulties.
My parents were more the type that drank coffee, at least my mother was. Every morning she would put up a big pot and when it was brewed, she would pour herself a cup in her favorite Corning Ware mug. But it was the pot that she brewed her coffee in that captivated me. It too was of the Corning Ware brand, but this pot had three blue periwinkle flowers centered on the lower half of the front of the pot, and for some reason, I thought they were beautiful and magical and fascinating. It was my favorite thing in our kitchen.
My mother drank her coffee black. Back then, she smoked cigarettes and often her friends from the neighborhood would sit in our orange vinyl breakfast nook and talk. Or rather they would gossip. They would chat about who had recently bought a new car or a fur coat or who was taking a vacation or a mistress or some new pill that had just come on the market. At eight years old, I was fascinated with my mother’s girlfriends: to me, they were magnificently glamorous with their brightly painted nails and tightly pulled faces and billowing wisps of smoke, and I would sit in the kitchen, off by myself, and pretend I wasn’t listening when in fact I wasn’t missing a word.
One day, one of my mother’s friends, Daphne, the brassy and most confident woman in the group, invited me to join them in the breakfast nook. I was surprised by this overture and suddenly shy. But the women all urged me over and made a place for me at the table. Then they did the unthinkable: they poured me a cup of coffee. My mother objected, but the ladies insisted and compromised by filling the mug to the tippy top with milk. I hesitated for a moment before I took a sip, and as my mouth approached the now lukewarm liquid, I inhaled the pungent aroma and fantasized that I had a cigarette languidly hanging out of a fabulously manicured hand and a cute pair of black cat glasses perched on my nose. The minute I tasted the coffee I knew I was fooling myself, I knew even before I sipped it that I wouldn’t like the bitter, acidy taste. I grimaced and swallowed and the worst possible thing happened: the ladies all laughed. “Oh she doesn’t like it,” Daphne declared. “Oh give her some time!” my mother retorted. “Who likes coffee when they’re eight years old?”
It took a long time for me to develop a taste for coffee. Back in college, my friend Linda’s Spanish boyfriend Jorge was convinced that anyone that didn’t drink espresso was uncivilized, and desperate to impress him, Linda and I joined him in a little café to become acquainted with this heady nectar. We both had teeny tiny cups perched in front of us; and at that moment I was convinced that this was tangible evidence of our maturity. I was also optimistic and convinced that what looked like nothing more than two tablespoons of liquid couldn’t possibly distress me too much. But alas, even after adding four packets of sugar, I was incapacitated. The two sips ended up looking like two liters and it took me two hours to finish it off.
I finally fell in love with coffee when I fell in love with Oscar. Oscar was British and beautiful and taught me two things: how to smoke and how to drink coffee. He liked his coffee light and sweet; initially I found it palatable but then began to crave it, and him, more and more. My love affair with coffee AND with love flourished in earnest.
These days I still put sugar in my coffee, but now I prefer it over ice. My mornings mostly start the same way, with a iced grande skim latte and an ultra-light cigarette, and as I slip on my black cat-like glasses I wonder how much I have been shaped by my family and my friends and my partners and their tastes. I think our lives are made up of these bits and pieces of our shared experiences and the rituals and habits we seek and feed not only signal our affiliations, they also help us define who we are, both to ourselves and to each other.
This is so lovely Debbie! I have to say that I'm a creature of ritual as well, and more often than not it's my mother's rituals that I discover I've adopted. Even when I protest and say I'm nothing like her, it still makes me feel warm inside when I am having my first morning cigarette or putting a carefully folded hand towel by the basin in the bathroom for guests!
On Dec.02.2007 at 05:54 PM