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Daddy would drink almost any liquid that wouldn't poison him -- all except alcohol. For instance, Daddy made sauerkraut in the dry cistern next to our house and he drank the juice from his makings. I don't know what made Mama sicker -- the smell of sauerkraut fermenting or seeing Daddy climb out of the cistern with a Mason jar of sauerkraut juice in his hand. She felt the same about his battle-scarred coffee cup. It made her ill just to look at the grody thing. So one day she took it upon herself to clean it. It was a catastrophic error in judgment that she never repeated. If coffee was Daddy's elixir of life, then his coffee mug was the holy grail. Unfortunately he never cleaned it. What once was white was now the hue of dark chocolate. Brown stains ran down the side, like tears, where coffee dribbled from Daddy's lips. The oil of a thousand pots of steaming brew languish in its bottom, its gracefully curved handle stained by Daddy's working fingers. Mama often told Daddy to clean his mug before he poisoned himself. Daddy insisted that cleaning the mug would spoil the flavor of his coffee. Only one pot of coffee was brewed each day at our house. By suppertime, the pot was almost empty. Daddy always saved enough for one last cup before he went to bed. He'd heat the remnants of the morning coffee to boiling, pour it into his sacred cup, then nurse it for at least an hour. By that time, of course, it was nothing more than concentrated caffeine, but Daddy slept like a log. One day, when Daddy was working out in the garden, Mama decided to take his coffee cup in hand. She immersed it in a strong bleach solution and, by some miracle, it came clean. It actually sparkled, which was more than I could say for Daddy when he discovered what Mama had done. "My coffee cup," he wailed. "You've ruined it." "Now, Harry, calm down," Mama soothed. "I just cleaned it, that's all." "You've ruined my cup, Helen. I had that cup just liked I wanted it. And now you've gone and ruined the taste of my coffee." "Nonsense," Mama said. "Your coffee will taste even better now that the cup is clean." "I don't want it to taste better. I want it to taste like it tasted, not how you wanted it to taste." Daddy was beside himself. That night he refused to drink his bedtime cup of brew in that pristine mug. Instead, he perked another pot of coffee -- this time triple strength -- poured it into a pot and dropped his cup into the solution. "What are you doing, Harry?" Mama asked. "I'm going to soak this cup for 24 hours," he growled. "Maybe then some of the flavor will come back." Mama just shook her head and swore that she would never wash Daddy's coffee cup again -- not even if he got down on his knees and begged her. The next night, Daddy checked his cup. It was a reasonable shade of brown but when he tried to drink his coffee, he said it still didn't taste the same. "Why not, Daddy?" I asked. "Your cup is brown again." "That may be true," he answered patiently. "But coffee cups are like fine wine. To be at the peak of its bouquet wine has to age slowly or it'll spoil. Unfortunately, your mother tapped my keg before it was ripe." NOTE: Daddy died in 1970. As per his will, that coffee cup -- which took Daddy two more years to return to normal -- was buried in the coffin with him. Mama swore that he did it so she would never be able to get her grimy mitts on it again.
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Copyright 2000 by Ed Price
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