Coffee Maker

"Good morning," I droned, not looking up from my oversized mug of coffee. Steam materialized on the surface and broke away, shrouding my drooping head in a gauzy veil of columbian supremo haze. It rolled over my face like a fond memory, caressing my skin and tickling my ears even as it teased me. Even in my drowsy state I knew it was much to hot to drink yet.

She had put it there for me, as she always did. Although she didn't drink it herself, some unspoken sense of duty drove her each morning to make a pot of coffee she'd never taste. Through trial and error, we'd evolved from hot water faintly tainted with coffee, to a black mess slightly thinner than porridge and brimming with dark, course grounds - eventually finding the perfect balance and the perfect cup. All this time it was her hands and my tastebuds, working in tandem - a gastronomical symbiosis that served her need to provide and my need for a strong morning stimulant.

"Good morning," I said again, my tone registering a slight irritation from the lack of a reply. There was a hollowness to the sound of my voice as it bounced off the oak veneer of the kitchen cabinets and worn linoleum flooring.

We had remodeled the kitchen the same year we found out she was pregnant with our first son. "Easy installments" on our Sears charge card had stretched out for over a decade as the woodwork took on a patina of splashed grease from Friday night fried chicken and absorbed the smells of all her home-cooked meals she made over the years. The boys are grown now, with families and debts of their own but the cabinets remain in mute remembrance of the good times.

There were bad times, too. Besides the usual bumps and bruises - and occasional broken bones - rambunctious boys will suffer in their conquest of the world, our little family took a harder blow eight years ago when she came home from her doctor looking drained and visibly shaken. "It's just a little lump, that's all," she told the boys. But they were older by then and knew more about cancer from high-school science classes than perhaps we did at the time. We learned more than we wanted though, in those weeks and months that followed. She continued to put on a brave face as first the cancer and then the chemotherapy took turns eating her from the inside out. Her brave, bright eyes dimmed and what hair she had left faded to match the steam rising from my coffee cup.

"Hon, everything OK?" I asked a little more concerned now, but still refusing to open my eyes to the bright morning rays that pried at the corners of my eyelids with sharp fingers of brilliance.

The morning sun always floods in brightly through the window over the kitchen sink where the boys and I would join her to wash dishes and sing some of our favorite family songs. Sure, it was corny, and the boys would be mortified if their friends from school caught wind of it, but it was one of those family traditions that didn't get put away along with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

Towards the end, it was one of the few things that could still make her smile through her fog of pain. When we saw her lips curl up despite the masks and hoses, we would sing louder still to drown out the beeps and hums from all the machines that clawed and bit into her like a hungry animal refusing to drop its meal. We stayed all night, gently holding hands deeply scarred and bruised from the endless succession of needles, and sang every song we could choke out past our tears. We were there, still singing quietly when she slipped away with an almost contented sigh, free from the needles and tubes, pain and bodily betrayal that had consumed her. My oldest son quietly left the room to make the necessary phone calls, while my youngest silently sat with his arm around me for the hour it took for me to finally let go of her hand.

There was no point in staying to mourn over that empty shell that served as her physical prison in those last few months, so I allowed myself to be brought home and with a tenderness I'd never previously known by them, put to bed by my two sons. There were no words exchanged. None were needed. In the silence we found solace and a bond beyond that of a father and his two sons.

It was the same silence that enveloped me even now as I finally relented and opened my eyes to the morning light to peer into my empty cup.

Something ... Anything

In an attempt to overcome the static friction that seems to be holding me in thrall and the general sense of ambivalence towards blogging in general, I thought I'd just start a blog-post and let my mind roam for a bit.

I've been suffering a general sense of creative malaise lately. That's not to say I haven't had a wide variety of topics on which to expound, and in a few cases - unleash a verbal army of rabid weasels. Rather, I felt a need to let a few things slide back into obscurity so I could get back to the orginal purpose of my blog: a vent for creative writing and an excercise in coalescing random thoughts into a cohesive pattern. Apparently, it gives me an opportunity to shake the cobwebs off my internal thesaurus as well.

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We recently returned from a long weekend visiting my parents at their new home in rural Arkansas. This is usually a beautiful time of the year to visit the rolling hills at the foot of Ouachita mountains with all the fall colors to be found in abundance. I say usually, because on this particular occasion, monsoon season had decided to make a vacation trip to Arkansas as well. Still, it was a pleasant and peaceful visit, watching the rain fall while sitting on the generous front porch of my parents' home. The ride home, however, was about as stressful a trip as ever I have made in a car. We (read: I) decided to take the scenic route home - riding along the top of the Ouachita Mountain Range on the Talimena Scenic Drive into Oklahoma and then back down into Texas. Thick fog and heavy rains made the twisted mountaintop drive an excercise in eye strain, trying to discern the faint contrast between the yellow stripes on the road against a backdrop of complete white-out. Amazingly, we passed a number of hapless motorcyclists who either courageously or foolishly braved the same conditions on half as many wheels. I was greatly relieved to finally drop down below the fog line, only to be set upon by blindingly heavy rains that pooled on the poorly designed and maintained Oklahoma roadways. Hydroplaning is one of those concepts taught in most driving schools, but remains virtually an academic excercise on Texas roads. Not so in Oklahoma where it was a constant struggle to keep our aging Mercury Sable Wagon from sliding off the road or into oncoming traffic. I felt like I was piloting a jet-ski more than a nearly twelve-year-old land-barge. Eventually, we finally made it across the state line into Texas, where we missed an opportunity to take a break inside the comfortable and spacious visitor center by only 10 minutes. The rest of the trip was completely uneventful, and I collapsed into the recliner just as fast as I could pull my boots off.