The Smell of Childhood

October 14, 2008

Sometimes writing is hard.

I find it best to write in the morning when my brain is overstimulated by caffeine. As a lifelong coffee junkie, I have depended on this uber-stimulant since adolescence to pull me and my overactive noggin out of whatever universe it visits during my "sleeping hours".

My first encounters with the morning beverage came in early childhood, when my mom and my grandmother would push brother Jim and me, sitting in their grocery carts, through the A&P. These trips almost always involved the purchase of a large bag of Eight O'Clock Coffee beans. These would be dumped into the large grinder at the checkout counter and returned to the bag in a much finer and more aromatic state. Then Jim and I would fight over the privilege of sticking our head in the bag to smell the ground beans. Our brother Keith, still an infant, was too small to participate in this ritual.

Coffee was an ingrained part of the culture in our family, especially in the morning. In her later years, Gram would sit over a cup of coffee all day, which sometimes became the consistency of molasses (with the flavor of old socks) after the percolator was plugged in for several hours.

After I reached twelve or so, I began to enjoy drinking it as much as I liked smelling it, albeit in a barely recognizable form after I larded it with three or four spoonfuls of sugar and diluted it with a lot of milk.

I really was not aware of the discrete effects of caffeine until I reached my forties; a morning cup was more a habit than a need. Then, in middle age, I became aware when the happy buzz of the bean kicked in. My thoughts became clearer, and came much faster, after a cup or two of coffee. I felt like I could conquer the world, no small thing when you are a person whose metabolism slouches along in perpetual first gear.

Alas, at some point my heart began to do this little dance that I like to call "arrhythmia". I began to realize that perhaps three cups of "high-test" were becoming a little too exciting. So, Norm and I started mixing decaffeinated coffee with regular.

Our process of coffee-making, established many years ago, involves grinding beans down to a fine powder by the use of a Krups coffee grinder (making sure that every last scintilla of bean was available for the brew). We use a Mr. Coffee-style coffeemaker, with the basket and the filters, which are always the brown, ecological kind. The coffeemaker is never cleaned, which is probably why we need a new one every few years. Call me crazy, but the coffee never seems to taste as good after all of those old coffee oils are removed.

These days, I find it necessary to moderate the amount of caffeine I ingest even more, so the brew is now two-thirds decaf. We still mostly use Eight O'Clock coffee, mixing decaf and regular, although sometimes recently we have become lazy coffee heretics and use Maxwell House already ground coffee. From a can.

I still love the smell of ground coffee in the morning, though. It smells like...childhood.