My First Cup of Coffee

I drank my first cup of coffee in a one-time Ecuadorian monastery. Trays of bread and plates of tropical fruit graced the table, and steaming eggs I couldn’t eat. I flipped over my little white ceramic teacup, oval saucer, spoon-formed dent in the rim. “Té o café?” the waitress asked. I hesitated a second. “Café.”

            She poured it, black. The scent was my grandma’s house and my best friend and bagel mornings with my aunts. It was also a little bit of sin. Sin burned when I drank it, that fire sip of steam. Sin tasted just like it smelled.

            Good.

            I should mention that this scene happened just over a month ago.

            People ask me why I don’t drink coffee. If I know them well enough, I tell them. It’s addictive, for one thing. And I get addicted. One of my addictions is avoiding addictions. If you don’t know what’s missing, why start?

            And if you can avoid a beverage that involves the destruction of rainforests, why start?  

            So was it ironic that I was sitting there, my first trip to a tropical country, finally drinking the drink that’s been such a destructive export? I looked around the table at my fellow classmates, mostly biology students—the people, the class I’d be with for these next two weeks. Yeah, a bit ironic; yeah, maybe my tongue’s burned-numb bite really was no accident. But I wasn’t eating the eggs. I wasn’t adding milk. And a skinny vegan in Ecuador had to take sustenance where she could find it.

            I lifted the coffee to my lips again, and this time tasted it slow. If I closed my eyes I probably could have seen my grandma’s apartment outside of Oakland; I could have been eight again, waking up on her living room floor to the sound of the coffee grinder and that big rainbow poster of the Beatles up on her wall. I didn’t know they were the Beatles back then. There were a lot of things I didn’t know.

            If you don’t know what’s missing, why start?

            I didn’t close my eyes. I looked around, took in this room, low ceiling, stone windowless walls. Over dish-clinks and wandering snatches of talk I could hear the fountain in the monastery courtyard—the first sound those monks would hear, maybe, on their way down here to mess. I didn’t know these people; I didn’t know this place. I barely knew those Spanish words that had slipped from my tongue. Café negra, por favor. No milk. Just give me memories.

            Something to stand on in this new journey. Something old in something new.