Wake up and smell the coffee: We need to make time for each other

SUSAN SCHWARTZ, The Gazette

Published: 4 hours ago

Sometimes, with before and after, there is a firm, clear line; other times, it is blurry and fuzzy - but no less real. With me and coffee, it is the second kind of line.

There was a time when it seemed we all drank coffee; we went out for coffee together and we invited each other in for coffee. We had lazy weekend mornings and evenings out with friends in places with red vinyl booths and white paper placemats, mugs re-filled over and over as we talked.

And then we didn't anymore.

We got too busy, too preoccupied. We let slide the fact that we needed time just for ourselves and for one another.

In time, I stopped drinking coffee altogether. At first it was to be temporary: antibiotics prescribed for a gum abscess were chewing up my stomach. But that was two years ago - and I never went back to it. In retrospect, I believe I stopped because my heart wasn't in it anymore.

At first, a part of me missed the ritual of preparing the strong, sweet brew - and its bracing effect in the early morning on my sleep-dulled brain. But drinking coffee, I believe, is not a solitary activity. It is an inherently social practice, an exercise that shows us and others that we are companionable beings. And these days, sadly, we are less social, less companionable.

Writer Judith Warner, whose Domestic Disturbances blog appears Fridays on the New York Times website, used a recent post to describe her attachment to coffee as being "about the taste, and the smell, and the gesture ... I mean the kind of gesture my mother's brother Mel used to make, waving toward the coffee pot, when you walked into his house in Brooklyn.

"There was, first, the gesture toward the pot, always on, always ready, always warm. Then there was a gesture toward a cup, then a gesture toward a chair ... you'd sit down at the table, in the breakfast room off the kitchen, and you'd gesture into conversation." These days, "no decent person keeps the coffee pot brewing all day. No one would dream of drinking that much caffeine. No one would dream of sitting still all day to schmooze." Still, she wrote, the aroma of coffee could transport her back in time "to a brick row house overflowing with great-aunts and grandparents, a kitchen filled with the smells of coffee and cookies and smoked fish and, of course, cigarettes." It was an evocative piece full of what Warner called "the shared sense of comfort and connection" that coffee had created. She described how she was 9 when she first started to drink coffee - as teaspoons of warm, milky brew from her father's cup in restaurants after dinner - and an adolescence "over never-empty cups" in places with names like Joe Junior's. "There was time for this then ... I miss that world terribly." If much of her post was an elegy to times past and lost places, Warner also wanted to transmit a sense of what she called her "repugnance for a world where, when people stop by your house, on the way from there to there with never a moment for here, they stand in the doorway, cellphone in one hand, water bottle in the other, too peripatetic to even entertain the notion of sitting down for a warm drink." She explained all this in a second post - after the first garnered nearly 300 responses in just days. People wanted to share their thoughts and, mainly, their own memories. Some posted about four-course Sunday dinners and Silex coffeemakers, about talking over coffee, arguing about politics and music.