2 posts tagged “coffee”

Sitting next to me at the coffee shop today...a couple fifty-something women from the same firm and their visiting regional or something-of-the-like thirty-something male manager.  The women are making small talk.  Starts out with a little gossip, you know...

[So-and-so] has been trying to get pregnant for years so it was especially tragic, losing the baby...

I heard she didn't want prenatal care.

Well, Sharon's her best friend and she told me...

Sharon is her best friend?!!  I never knew that...

And so on.
But very soon it becomes:
I don't know what's wrong with my mother.  I don't know.  She's feeding the dog cat food and the cat dog food and taking their water inside when they're outside.  I swear I'm gonna come home one day and my pets will be dead.  I told her not to feed the animals.  I took all the knobs off the stove and put an 'out of order' sign on it.  Frankly, I'm just concerned that she might burn down the house.  We bought her a new coffee maker, but God forbid you bring anything new in the house, there's no way she can handle it.  And the microwave?  Forget it.  I mean, she's a sweet woman, you know.  But, well, she's 92.

Well, my mother's only 68 and she's so shot full of vicadin, morphine, anti-anxiety drugs and the whatnot, I swear, I can't even think about her driving.  It scares me.  So  I just don't think about it.

Well, I don't want to scare you, but my niece was on anti-depressants, nice Catholic girl, and ran a stop sign and killed a 54 year old mother of four.  You can bet my aunt and uncle are gonna lose everything because, you know, four kids, they're gonna sue.  It's sad because my niece is a wonderful woman and she's had her share, I mean, with her ex molesting the girls and her mother dying so young...and having that bi-polar diagnosis didn't help.

Everybody dies young in my family.  My father was 39 and my mother was 42, but that doesn't count because she drank herself to death.  And remember, my nephew--

I hear Hazelton's a good place.

I hear that too.

Isn't this when I, sitting a foot away, am entitled to turn to these people and say:
Your mother has Alzheimers.
Your mother is a drug addict.  Think about it.
Is killing someone as a nice Catholic girl more tragic than killing someone as a nice Jewish or Muslim girl?
Are the laws of attraction as such that if you talk so much about death and tragedy and its inevitability that you will bring on your own premature death?  Or do you think that the floorplans are all in place and there's not a thing that we can do?

I swear, I wanted to drop my head on the table and fall into a deep deep midday-in-window-sunlight sleep.

It is a beautiful day and I'm leaving to pick up my kids at school.  I will buy them ice cream today, try to make them laugh and agree to all their requests until the memory of the grown children in the lunch table next to me fades.  K     

So Jim's post got me to thinking of the time I was living in a four story walk-up on the east side of NYC (many moons ago) over the most amazing French bake shop.  I didn't make coffee EVER.  Smells of vanilla and almond paste woke me up mornings and I'd hop downstairs and take out a large coffee and an almond croissant.  Yes, every morning.  When I'd grow tired of almond, there were muffins in every conceivable combination of fruit and nut, and brioche and rolls and madeleines or just the smell, which sometimes was enough.   Just the smell.  Kind of like the smell of potential.  Always keep the smell.

So todays the resurrection, right?  Pardon me, my father was a fallen Catholic and my mother was Jewish.  On Easter morning I would take the 25 cent bag of jelly beans that I'd gotten at the Palms coffee shop, find a nice dead branch with lots of tiny twigs still on it, and I'd stick the jelly beans on all the ends.  Then I'd stick the jelly bean tree in the ground and summon my younger brother, swearing that the tree had appeared overnight in honor of Easter, since our basic understanding of Easter pretty much encompassed the idea of gelatin candy, chocolate in cute shapes and plush rabbits.  Years after the jelly bean trees stopped appearing, my father asked me if I knew about Jesus, as though he had waited for me to inherit some complete understanding of Christianity, as I had inherited my mother's late onset of puberty.  I think I said something like "Don't worry, I know who Jesus Christ is, Dad."  And he chuckled, perhaps half embarrassed and said, "I was just wondering."   Then I think he asked me if  I needed a ride to Susan Berg's house.

Happy Easter.  K