Coffee Odyssey

Well folks, I’ve come to a lull in the fighting—one that should last until January. As of Wednesday the semester is officially over and I’m one week, one paper, one presentation, and one exam away from leaving the City of Eternal Spring behind me indefinitely. Tonight I’m just relaxing and thinking about the things I’ll miss when I leave Cuernavaca…inevitably the 11 peso Americanos come to mind (that’s 83 cents these days, yo). I realized that I’ve made a lot of references to coffee since I’ve been down here—enough to be called a coffee fanatic, snob, and addict. I may be all those things. If so, my apologies…I hate fanatics, have a distaste for snobs, and addicts…well, they’re ok. Anyway, I gave my own personal coffee odyssey this afternoon and I thought I might share it with you—not to justify my fanaticism, but because I kind of want to see exactly what it is. And it may explain some things about me, who knows?

Today I had lunch with some German friends at the city’s only health food restaurant, a fine establishment where 45 pesos brings a veritable feast to your table. The last course is coffee (or tea) and dessert and, as we sat and sipped our hot beverages, the non-coffee-drinking Germans asked me about how I came to like coffee. So I told them. First off, I was born into a coffee family. As I grew up I watched Mom and Dad become ever more skillful at preparing the stuff and ever more elitist in their tastes. Though I loved the smell, I could never understand how they could like the taste. This continued into high school…I drank a bit with dessert when guests were over, but usually just because I wanted to talk with the adults.

During the last years of school, I started playing guitar with a bunch of honest-to-goodness good ol’ boys at the Black Mountain Center: an old banjo player named Bud Lewis, his middle-aged sons, and their posse of rag tag pickers and grinners (notably the illustrious Mark Bordeaux and this guy from Warren Wilson who played a saw…yep, a saw). Every Tuesday at 7:30 the hits rolled out of that little auditorium like Bel Airs from a '57 production line (boy, GM's wishin those days would come back aound)—mostly old time standards played in a distinct Americana Honky-Tonk style. I think that was where I started to play and sing in front of people—good place to start because the residents there loved whatever you played, as long as it had a good beat. You learn a lot about live music playing for elderly mental patients.

I left every week with a smile on my face and not a little homework to finish so every week I’d head to the Dripolator in Black Mountain (before the downtown Drip days, y’all) to write, read, procrastinate, or what have you until they shut the place down. I started off getting chai lattes and the like, but soon realized that a chai habit was nigh on unsupportable and switched to coffee, the cheapest way to rent space in the Drip’s cosy wood-toned confines. It felt pretty official, studying with the college kids, a steaming cup of Joe weighing down a copy of that week’s Mountain Xpress. In the cold winter months, the warm glow of the shop was a destination in itself. I’d walk in shaking off the cold, order up a round, and just bask in how perfectly ideal my Tuesday nights were. Somewhere along the line, I started to associate the taste of the coffee with the perfection of the Black Mountain Center Opry (not an official term…yet) and the relaxed homework sessions, completed to the rhythm of the Drip’s spot-on soundtrack—how could I not begin to love coffee after that?

That year, I started to understand what all the fuss was about. More importantly, I started to understand why Dad’s breath always smelled like coffee when he whispered to me in church. I started to enjoy the fact that my parents liked to do coffee right. I started to look forward to the big pot that they broke out when folks came over to the house. All in all, I made a pretty smooth transition from the realm of social coffee drinking to that of light coffee appreciation.

Then I went to school. Some people say that Chapel Hill has the largest number of coffee shops per capita in the country and, while that might be a bit far-fetched, I think it’s safe to say that my choice of university did not serve to diminish my taste for coffee. In fact, one of my first quests after arriving at UNC was to find the place that felt the most like the Dripolator—thus ensuring myself a spot to actually get work done. I found it at the Open Eye Café and quickly, without ceremony, became a regular. Again, a cup of hot brew became associated with good things. This time the mug rested on the latest issue of the Indy Weekly or a half-finished DTH crossword, but the vibe was about the same. The Open Eye was a nice little place to swing by during one of my numerous escapes from campus. To stop in and work or procrastinate a bit on the way to/from the thrift store was the pinnacle of any given afternoon.

And now I’m here in México averaging over a cup a day and really able to tell what a good cup of coffee is and what’s not worth my time. It’s an entertaining hobby here in a land of exceptional, largely unappreciated beans (99.99% of people drink instant Nescafé) and one that I acquired second-hand: from the glowing hominess of a little shop in Black Mountain, NC while trudging through the academic mess of senior year. 

All this blabber brings to light two fairly intriguing factoids (awesome word). 1.) Despite having all the trappings of upper-middle class coffee-taste-inheritance, my taste for coffee stemmed from an acute appreciation of workplace comfort. You decide the lesser of two evils. 2.) After thinking through the above journey, it turns out my high school education did have a point to it after all. Who knew?