It is an odd thing that much of the happiness I experienced as a child had to do with drinking coffee in a very poor community, and with people who, though educated by the WPA, TVA, WWII, and Reader's Digest Condensed Books, were particularly unsophisticated and unworldly. And, as we in early 21st century America are led to believe that an over-priced cup of coffee is a necessary accompaniment to the good life led by the educated, moneyed, and, therefore, enlightened, it seems especially incongruous to remember sitting in the lap of one of my great uncles, breathing in the dust of cigarette ashes, mortar mix and fine sand embedded in wrinkled skin, and happily sipping a dark, hot drink from almost translucent chipped mugs. So for me, the ritual of coffee began early, and was planted in my memory as a ritual of love and indulgence that has taken on, over time, a spiritual aspect.

I'm sure my love of the ritual began because I associated it with a great deal of attention, and, as often as not, a sweet treat that I might have been denied by my less indulgent parents. Among my first memories are those of Great Uncles Clyde and Dempsey allowing me to dunk my clandestine vanilla wafer in their coffee while they listened to the radio news after a long day of laying brick with my father. I don't know if my parents knew or approved of this cookie-dunking business. In my recollection, they were often delightfully absent in the early evenings - perhaps they were working in the garden outside the white clapboard-over-log house we shared with my father's unmarried aunt and uncles. Perhaps they were out driving the many country roads in those days when gas was still cheap and unconnected to the Persian Gulf War or a far away wildlife refuge endangered by greed. Or, in the best of all possible worlds, maybe they were sequestered in some cool, shaded room on one of my great aunt's worn quilts or chenille peacock spreads, while their children were otherwise occupied and they had as respite a brief privacy.

Anyway, whatever they were doing with the little amount of time afforded them allowed the extended family to dote on me. One of the ways they doted was by giving me my first dose of adult drink along with snippets of real adult conversations and concerns - would my father let them take his truck to buy bootleg liquor on Friday (Swain County was still dry at the time); what would Johnson do with Vietnam, now that he'd had to take over Kennedy's office; why wasn't that row of Silver Queen doing any good this year?

As I grew older and my great uncles came and went based on their need for money, stability, or someone to help them get through delirium tremens, I focused more on my parents. If I heard them moving about in the kitchen before my father left for work, I rose early from the bed I shared, alternately, with my great aunt and older sister. Though I was by nature a morning person, my main incentive for rising before daylight was the possibility of my parents pouring me a very small amount of coffee in the bottom of a mug, then filling the rest with what we called "sweet milk."

These were particularly memorable times for me because, with one sister already there and another on the way, plus the three extended family members and what seemed to me their increasingly complex, removed lives in and out of the house, it was not often that I had my parents to myself in any capacity.

On the few snowy days in winter when my father couldn't work and allowed my mother to sleep late, I have memories of biscuits he baked in the oven compartment of the wood cookstove, and of the smell of coffee wafting up from the enormous pot that was likely a relic from my great aunt's days as a logging camp cook.

However, mostly pleasant as life was in that house in what was then still remote southern Appalachia, it had to change. Progress, (that state of flux which I view with increasing ambivalence), came to the community of Euchella - first indoor plumbing on what had been a small back porch, then a telephone, then a television. And my family changed as well, growing to the point that there was no longer room for everyone in that house we'd rented together for almost as long as I could remember. I, my parents, two sisters, and, eventually, two brothers, took up residence across the quiet road (now the never-silent road into the playground of the Nantahala Gorge) from the aunt and uncles, in a sturdy tan and brown trailer that my father would add to over the years.

My parents, busier than I, even as an adult, can now imagine, filled their lives to what must have been the bursting point with my father's seven-day-a-week work as a mason, raising five children on a less-than-shoestring budget and more or less successful attempts at cultivating a small farm that consisted of 17 acres, a large garden, a complacent cow, several hogs who were briefly and somewhat superficially mourned by us children at butchering, then eaten anyway and a handful of suspicious and unfriendly chickens. As the family and my parents' responsibilities grew, the times I had alone with them became fewer. But it still seems those times, when they were available, involved a cup of coffee, which, by the age of 10 or so, I was allowed in moderation with or before my breakfast every day.

Of course, it's not so much the privilege of drinking coffee that remains large in my memory. Instead it's that those rare moments when I sat, first in a cool, dim room with two prematurely old WWII veterans, both binge alcoholics who made me feel important and adored, and then in the tiny, cluttered living room of the trailer with one or both of my parents, sipping coffee and mesmerized by the complicated and often violent adult world, it's that those were moments of confidences, of possibilities. It's that I was a priority, and that they were deeply interested in what I was capable of doing and becoming, and, as my parents became more involved with fundamentalist Christianity, my time spent drinking coffee with them in the morning was a time for them to talk about their concern with where my spiritual values lay.

As I grew older, these talks often turned into miserable, unwinnable arguments of why I didn't believe as they did, or, during one brief period in high school, still, I think, cherished by my mother, of how my spiritual beliefs had actually begun to move somewhere near theirs. But no matter how these conversations concluded, I knew what they meant - that my parents cared, that they wanted to know who I was, what I believed, where I was going. As I look back, it seems every one of these conversations began with one of them handing me a cup of coffee the way I liked it - about a third cream - pretty much the same as the cups of coffee my great uncles gave me as a small child.

When I go "home" now, my parents' house is usually filled with their children's and grandchildren's particular brand of noisy discord - the sometimes amusing, sometimes tense, but always interesting minglings of vastly different lives. When I do manage to catch my parents in a quiet moment, we often wind up perched at the incongruous stone table my father built years ago as part of the many additions he'd added to the small trailer in keeping with his growing family. They offer me a cup of coffee, and I usually accept; though, as my age and insomnia increase in equal proportion, I drink caffeinated coffee in moderation. No one needs to mention that it isn't really the caffeine we want. What we crave much more than caffeine's mild and hopeful high is the ritual of pouring something warm and pleasant into a cup, placing it in the hands of people we love, and listening as they tell what their lives are like at one ephemeral moment in time.

This is why, I tell myself, I allow my young daughter a cup of coffee with milk and brown sugar on weekend mornings. It is not because I want her to become a coffee addict, (though that addiction is a mild one in our consumer-driven culture). It is because it's a way of sharing something I love, and because it's one of the more pleasant traditions in my family.

The frame house, my great aunt and uncles, the wood cook stove, the garden, my parents' youth and passion - all those are gone, disappeared along with the dusty roads they drove, bordered always in my memory by blackberry brambles. The era in which these mountains were an island in a sea of change are also gone. I can't offer my daughter the past, though the sentimental part of me that I mostly resist wants to do just that. My daughter doesn't have a Great Uncle Clyde or Dempsey, and her exposure to my parents is limited to infrequent visits we fit into absurdly busy lives, and shaped by her own interests, which lie far outside their home, their religion. Her childhood is almost nothing like mine - neither the good I continue to hold, nor the less-than-good that I try to let go, and which has no place here. I don't want to recreate my childhood. I just want to give her what meant so much to me - the riches of time set aside for conversation, the choice of old ways or new, of taking one's coffee creamy or black, or with sweet bits of wafer floating on top.

(Dawn Gilchrist-Young is a public school teacher. She can be reached at youngericyoung@cs.com)

 

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