Ordinary Coffee

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I wrote this a few months ago, back when we were all still going to work. I miss my morning coffee downstairs with Ed who takes good care of the seniors at our community center and me.

At the office, I go downstairs for coffee. There's always a pot on. Folks there prepping for seniors who come to breakfast and stay for lunch. They invite me for a daily cup. I pour and wish them a good day. They wish me a great one.

It’s ordinary coffee. Maxwell House or Folgers. Scooped from a can into a white paper filter. Hot water runs through the machine, extracting some flavor, some bitterness.

Dad kept coffee on all day. A pot in the morning. One after dinner. When anyone came to visit. When the guys were over to work a funeral. When he went out late to a house, hospital, or nursing home to retrieve the dead and help the living find their way again.

Just ordinary coffee. Maxwell House or Folgers. Scooped from a can into a white paper filter. Hot water run through the machine, extracting some flavor, some bitterness, some darkness.

Dad always offered a cup. Always accepted one. He’d sit, drink coffee, talk, and listen. In his kitchen. In theirs.

At the office, I always accept the offered coffee poured into my cup over the stain of the day before's coffee. I stand, sip that bitter coffee, talk, and listen.

Dad's unfinished cup has gone cold in the kitchen of memory. Death having called him out one last time.

Ordinary coffee. Maxwell House or Folgers. Scooped from a can into a white paper filter. Hot water run through the machine, extracting some flavor, some bitterness, some darkness, some light.

I carry that coffee up to my office and sit alone sipping again from a cup daily refilled.

We'll Do It Live!

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Pardon me a moment while I preach to the choir.

An NPR station in Washington State will no longer carry the orange maggot's press conferences live from the White House. Instead, they will monitor and report only that which is factual and responsible in them. Basically, they're choosing not broadcast the man-child's campaign rallies which, more than usual, pose an imminent threat to us all.

I get that some people are going to disagree with this and many of them will go bat-shit crazy while forgetting that:

  1. This is one NPR station making an editorial choice as news organizations should.
  2. Fox doesn't often carry Democratic campaign rallies or news conferences live.
  3. The briefings are available elsewhere.
  4. The First Amendment doesn't require live coverage of Presidential briefings.

The station announced its decision on Twitter and read the tweet. I have long ago deleted my account but forgot two things:

  1. Never read the replies to any tweet.
  2. Visiting Twitter is swimming in a cesspool.

As I do often these days, I washed my hands thoroughly, this time mostly to wash my hands of Twitter, the hoi-polloi, and the maggot. I probably needed a shower.

Andrew Cuomo's briefings have been a comfort for me, but I didn't watch him live today. I read about it after the face and was fully informed.

Perhaps the maggot followers can't read more than a tweet. That or they're just out of their minds and have been for a long time.

This concludes my preaching to the choir. We now rejoin our regularly scheduled live briefing already in progress.

This post's title comes from one of television's most beautiful moments.

Time To Rest

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When I get an idea in bed, I write it on a sticky-note and go on to sleep. The next morning, I usually take the sticky-note downstairs and write the idea in my Morning Pages. I found an old sticky-note today, something I meant to write but for which I didn't have the time. I've got plenty of time now.

The note says:

The difference, lying in bed, between commanding "I have to get to sleep" and gently saying "It is time to rest."

I remember the feeling I had that night, lying in bed. It was late. I was tired, but my mind was racing, like it is most every night now. I looked at the clock, calculated the hours left before my alarm would sound, and told myself, "I have to get to sleep right now." I may have sworn at myself. That has been known to happen.

But then something caught me. I love when this happens. A warning light flashed in the control room of my mind. I opened my clenched eyes and let go the breath I had been holding.

"Rest," I whispered to the darkness. My wife was downstairs and the cat never listens, so I was the only audience for this. "It is time to rest," I told myself, my voice gentle and patient, as though I were talking to a child, someone I love.

I didn't fall asleep immediately. Life doesn't work that way. This isn't magic. Well, it is, but not that kind of magic. It's the kind of magic that eases the weight of anxiety by gently wafting it away.

I tend to yell at myself to change my behavior. Funny, because I had a sign in my classroom saying, No one ever changed my mind by yelling at me. The real magic was in the moment of realization that there was another way to go.

I can recycle that sticky-note now that I've written this. Although I'm tempted to stick it to the wall beside the bed, the dash of my car, the inside of my computer, or maybe just on my forehead, written backward, so I look at it every time I feverishly wash my hands and hope for the best.