Coffee

This morning I was outside with the baby. It was raining and she wanted to sit on the porch and watch the weather. This is a favorite pastime of hers. Just watching things. Whether it’s rain, wind or the “Fiber Truck” coming down the street. She’s wonderfully in tune with the world around her.

I sat in the morning chill with the baby cuddled on my lap and a good, hot cup of coffee in my hand. As I watched the steam billow pleasingly from the hot liquid I couldn’t help thinking of my dad, for some reason.

It’s not that the thought of coffee is indelibly tied to thoughts of my father. I remember him drinking coffee, sure. But it’s no more of a concrete image than of him lifting off his cap, smoothing his hair, replacing his cap and then yelling out some command to his football team. It’s just an image. Not much of a memory.

But watching that steam billow from the coffee made me think of my dad while he was stationed in Korea. I imagine it was hellishly cold there in the winter. He lived in an army issued tent wearing army issued clothes. Warmth in the dead of winter must have been a luxury that was so sought after that men would have paid more for a minute next to a fire than an hour with a pretty girl.

I imagine my father in his army greens huddled with a hot cup of coffee. The coffee, in my imagination, was acrid and foul. A bitter, dark concoction whose only relationship to coffee was the name. I imagine some pallid, brownish beans being crushed rather than ground, placed in a massive cheese cloth filter and dropped into a vat of boiling water with a spigot attached to it.

The coffee probably tasted like acid. Foul and bitter. But its warmth, and the connotations of a good cup of joe, were probably welcome comforts. Perhaps while chugging the brown, brackish swill, he was able to think of himself at home with his buddies in front of Mack’s, the mysterious dime store (I think) that appears in one of my favorite photos of my father from his youth.

More likely, however, he enjoyed the warmth and thought about my mom before he set back out to do whatever assigned task was his. Maybe he calculated the days until he went home. Then he probably looked at his army cohorts and made a wise-ass comment about the cold.

In my head, he flips up his collar and goes back into the wind. Young, bright. Not knowing his fate 29 years later. Not knowing he’d be the father of eight. Not knowing that to some, his memory would be more legend than anything else.