Coffee Been

I recently suffered through a culinary crisis.

My local Meijer, which is undergoing extensive renovations, ran out of the forty ounce bags of Starbucks House Blend Coffee Beans. For a week!

This may not seem like more than a blip on the radar to you, but it was a major meltdown for me. Starbucks is available in a variety of forms, with different blends and roasts in various size bags. I ought to have found a satisfactory substitute in three seconds without taking a step.

Not so.

For starters, the only other choices came in ten ounce bags, a quarter the size of our usual purchase. Okay, grab a bag. But we drink a lot of coffee. Ten ounces might last ten minutes. Second, the only small bags of House Blend were ground. We ALWAYS grind our own beans. Ground beans are definitely unacceptable.

I looked at the other choices. Growing up in Boston, I started off with Dunkin Donuts coffee, but had a bad experience, once. Once burned, twice wary. I wasn’t going to buy a giant bag of unknown beans. I settled for the Meijer House Blend beans which were nothing like Starbucks. Before the twelve ounce bag was finished, I was down at Sam’s Club hunting for another big Starbucks bag. The first cup tasted like heaven. What’s next for me, cocaine?

What does coffee have to do with writing?

Coffee, like alcohol is a ubiquitous social lubricant. Offices everywhere are fueled with the stuff. Many people require major infusions just to get their heart started in the morning. Any work of fiction needs coffee references to anchor it in reality.

Coffee is also a time marker. Over the last hundred years, it has undergone an evolution that marks the transformation of American society from a rural backwater to a sophisticated urbane consumer icon.

Originally, we went to the A&P for Eight O’clock. The grinding machine sat next to the cash register, filling the store with that pungent ambrosia. Then Maxwell House and Chock Full O’ Nuts came along with big cans of coarsely ground beans. Then Folgers.

In the mid-1980s, I tasted Kona on a trip to Hawaii and suddenly realized that coffee was more than a generic drug. Our countertop grinder saw a succession of blends including Jamaican Blue Mountain before Starbucks swept over the scene, fomenting revolution. We have not been the same, since.

Other writers seem coffee obsessed, too. Stieg Larsson couldn’t cover a page without spilling two or three cups. Maybe it’s a Scandinavian thing.

Enough. My first cup waits. My hands are starting to shake.