The Best Part of Waking Up....

I don’t really know when I became such a big fan of coffee. But it’s been a part of my daily routine since at least my teenage years.

In lieu of drinking alcohol and having unprotected sex, I opted to spend my rebellious years hanging out at the local Perkins restaurant, having cup after cup of their bottomless pot of coffee and partaking in the verbal exchanges between customers and waitresses.

It wasn’t that the coffee was exceptional. It was just McGarveys, I was told. But if brewed and mixed correctly, it was a rich bouquet that filled the nostrils and awakened the senses. It was really the conversation that I yearned for. Our little exchanges also opened the door for what I hoped could be secret late night liaisons. Something that would begin, "so…what are you doing when you get off?" "I don’t know, I’m wide awake." "Do you want to come over and watch a movie" I think you know where this is going…..

There’s been so many ladies' names that have poured coffee for me…and I’ve loved every one of them. I thought I was going to marry a waitress. It was either going to be a waitress or a stripper. I guess I felt sorry for the girls working in both professions since I knew that they worked really hard and had to take a lot of crap from stupid people.

I really hit my stride after I got married. I found brands like Eight O’Clock and Starbucks. My mother use to talk about Eight O’Clock. She used to buy it and it had been around forever. And you just couldn’t go wrong with Starbucks….it was very hard to get a bad cup of Starbucks.
I avoid bad coffee like the plague. While friends of mine would stop anywhere for a cup, not me. The places I stopped had to set a certain standard in the coffee they used, how they brewed it, what kind of water they used, when they threw out the old stuff and brewed a new pot. If I walked into a place and the coffee tasted like someone had thrown their old dirty sweaty socks in to the urn, I’d switch to pop. Yuck. While some gas station coffee was good, others were like drinking the gasoline they pumped.

I’m just a coffee snob. I don’t know what made me into a snob. I just know that coffee serves not only as a beverage and a stimulant, but it draws people together, a warm, inviting brew that people can talk over and get to know each other. It provides the open invitation of, "Stop by anytime, the coffee is always on!"

That’s the way it was at our house when I was growing up. Mom and Dad’s coffee pot was always on. And I mean always. No matter what time of the day or night you’d drop by our house, there’d be coffee. It might be very old and very burnt, but it was still coffee. But at least you knew….you were welcome.