I returned to coffee after reading the latest health benefits attributed to coffee: improved energy (#1), lowered risk of Type 2 diabetes, protection against Alzheimer’s, dementia, and cirrhosis of the liver, helps burn fat…
Both sets of my grandparents advised me as a child against drinking even diluted coffee milk because it would stunt my growth and impair my thinking abilities. However, the scent of coffee brewing in their households was a delicious smell on mornings when I spent time with them for a week or more during summer vacations. Although my paternal grandfather, Emerson Lavergne Marquart, was of German descent, he had adopted the Cajun way of brewing good coffee after his marriage to my Cajun grandmother. He used a battered white enamel drip pot to make the dark French roast coffee that I yearned to taste as a child, but he forbade me to have even a demitasse cupful that he used to serve adults just waking up from an afternoon nap.
In my maternal grandmother’s kitchen, coffee was brewed only in the early morning, and she was the guardian of a pot that produced a wimpy, light brown liquid she claimed would keep me forever short (which I achieved without partaking of the coffee milk for which I craved just one taste). But, then, she issued health and safety bulletins at every turn to the extent that I'm still afraid to be in an indoor tub of water during lightning storms, feel that I must have my feet covered no matter the weather or locale, and, she emphasized, I must never mention that I had a bathroom call. In addition to the ban on coffee, she advised us to never drink wine as it would cause us to go crazy. It took me awhile to get over the latter admonitions, but I finally gave in to the idea that a cup of coffee and four ounces of wine daily wasn’t going to kill me or make me crazy.
Coffee consumption can be traced back to Ethiopia and a goat herder named Kaldi who noticed that his goats didn’t want to sleep after they had consumed berries from a particular tree. He’s said to have reported this to the abbot of a monastery who decided to brew a drink using the berries and discovered that the concoction would keep his monks awake to do their prayers throughout the night after partaking of this beverage. During the 18th century, coffee seedlings were planted in the Royal Botanical gardens in Paris, and a seedling was transferred to Martinique where it became the parent of coffee throughout South and Central America. And so it began…and so the coffee industry is now a billion dollar industry!
During the 1940’s, the musical group, The Ink Spots, gave coffee a new name through their song, “Java Jive,” a song so compelling that my father-in-law decided to use the term “java” on a trip to New York City — a famous trip in which my sister-in-law transported every pair of shoes she owned in a washtub and forced my husband to carry this shoe holder through the lobby of a hotel. As if that wasn’t enough embarrassment for my husband, my father-in-law took him to a dime store restaurant, climbed on one of those red, plastic covered stools popular in the 1940’s, and ordered “a cup of java and some flapjacks” in a loud voice. The Clampetts of the "Beverly Hillbillies” couldn’t have played hillbilly better, but my husband never visited New York City again. We only passed through the Big Apple (got lost and bought a cup of coffee at a gas station) on the way to a military assignment in Maine.
And for all of us who call ourselves poets, what would we have done during the Hippy or Beatnik eras had it not been for poetry readings at coffee houses? Even the Brits had their coffee houses, 300 of which existed in London as early as the 17th century.
Thomas Jefferson once acknowledged that coffee was the favorite drink of the civilized world, and I heartily agree. I’m feeling much more civilized since I resumed my one cup in the mornings. Viva Java!
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