Out for Coffee

Coffee and me go back to college.  The school cafeteria offered breakfast coffee for 10 cents with unlimited refills.  Most mornings I would get a bow tie pastry with it, streusel + confectioners sugar coated for 25 cents, leaving me with energy for AM classes.  Within a year, I found an orange percolator that served me well studying for exams at night through medical school.  Can't remember where I lost it.  My father drank instant.  Phooey.

Living in Harvard housing, the Square had a shop called Coffee Connection, introduced to me by my wife.  They may have been the precursor to Starbucks, which eventually absorbed them.  Early on a weekend morning I could head over there and purchase a brew in an individual French press.  They had multiple types and you could buy beans, thus my first home coffee grinder, a blade type.  As I ventured to Fanueil Hall Marketplace, there were other places to sample different coffees,  12 oz for about 75 cents.  My home still had canned coffee, whatever was discounted at the supermarket, though by then I had developed a preference for Folgers over the other large commercial brands.  Only one blend per manufacturer at the time.

Fondness for coffee has continued to this day.  I have a bunch of French Presses, a keurig maker, three coffee cones, two drip machines, a stovetop percolator and and electric percolator, not to mention a party sized urn that rarely gets used and both manual and electric espresso makers.  My staple, though has been the keurig cups, enabling variety and ease of use with small sacrifice to taste.  Why ever go out?

Despite my gadgetry, I cannot duplicate what Starbucks and the like do.  WaWa has some varieties of good consistency at a lower price which I get when I am in transit.  When coffee houses were a novelty to me, the coffee in its variety, made with expertise, was my destination.  More recently, though, the destination has been less beverage and more transient space rental while I plan my week on Sunday mornings at the Brew HaHa or take my laptop to Starbucks to rent space at their counter while I type an essay.  Artists and Bohemians have been meeting at European coffee houses for centuries, less to drink coffee and more to expand their minds with each other.  I do it alone, but same basic principle.  Since the purpose is to minimize distraction and promote focus, I stopped going to the nearest Starbucks with loud music and traffic in favor of a newer one, more thoughtfully laid out to enable productive efforts.  The Brew HaHa is also quiet with the tables placed away from customer traffic.  And my car, with it's paper 20 oz cup of Ethiopian or Peruvian special, affords me the ultimate in solitude as I pay attention to the road.  Usually I have a destination, sometimes important, sometimes not.  So while coffee has remained a cheap hobby for me from my earliest adult years, sometimes the taste is supportive of something else that often has greater importance.  But we don't engage in great thought sipping Maxwell House.