Coffee Talk

Don't you hate cliffhangers? Especially when they aren't resolved quickly? Don't worry, I'll get to San Francisco. And Las Vegas, too, for that matter. But I started sounding like too much of a sad sack, when really, I'm not like that (ha! you say). So I thought I'd talk about something near to my heart that I love. Coffee.

Coffee actually plays a big part in Steve's and my romance. We met at Starbucks and then Panera (free WiFi). We both absolutely loved coffee, but Steve was the connoisseur. He was the person who turned me on to Starbuck's African blends. He bought Kenya, then I found Sidamo, which has just a hint of citrus in it.

So much of our romantic history has links to coffee and coffee shops. We met, as I said, at coffee shops when we were falling in love. After he started a new job in Princeton, I would drop Tom off and then go to Starbucks and buy him a double-cupped Americano (and me a Skinny Vanilla Latte) and take it to his office. We would sit in the parking lot for a few minutes before he went back into work.


When we decided that we had to go give it one more try at our respective homes, for the sakes of Alex and Tom, we said good-bye in a Starbucks. We agreed not to communicate for six weeks and then decide what to do. I cried, he had tears in his eyes. The next morning, he called me shortly after I dropped Alex off at school. "Come to me, Katie," he said. He was waiting at Panera. I did. I could not not meet him. After that, we still agreed that we would make a decision on the appointed day, we just wouldn't go "cold turkey." We agreed to meet, yet again, at Panera, if we wanted to continue seeing each other. I got there, my usual early self. I sat and waited. He is usually not ridiculously early the way I am, but he is always on time. The appointed meeting time---9am---came and went and I started to get panicky. It was really only about 9:07 when he showed up, but in those seven minutes, my whole life flashed before my eyes. I could not bear life without him, I thought. I wondered how long I should wait. We'd agreed not to call, but should I? Well, at 9:07, he came running in with roses. He'd wanted to commemorate the occasion, but he'd gotten into a slow line at the market. When I saw him, with his distinctive, jaunty walk, coming across the street (I was sitting at a window), my heart leapt, I broke into a huge smile, and I felt as happy as I'd ever felt in my life.

The rest, as they say, is history.

So, now we are living together, and work schedules and the fact that we don't have to steal minutes out of the day to see each other has meant that my bringing coffee to his office slowed and then stopped. But we still enjoyed long, leisurely mornings on the weekends, drinking coffee and reading the New York Times in bed. I told you in my previous post that I'd been touched that Steve started jumping out of bed to be the one to make coffee and get the paper---I tried to split it 50/50---until I realized that while the coffee was brewing, he was chatting to women with names like "SexKitten4U" online.

But something else stopped the whole coffee-sharing experience, and it's one of those things that make you feel foolish, but wistful at the same time. Steve decided one day to give up coffee. I know I shouldn't take it as rejection or feel insecure about it, but I am, as you probably know by now, a little crazy. It was so much a part of of courtship, and one of the best parts of my weekend mornings. Not that I still don't have coffee---Steve still runs down to make it (see paragraph 6). And he makes himself, or I make him, tea. But it's not the same. We no longer share opinions about new coffee types. We don't give each other the Starbucks MP3 of the week (you get those in the stores). His giving up coffee has sort of eliminated a whole bunch of Christmas stocking ideas, although I've tried to switch over. This must be how drinkers feel when one of their crowd goes to AA. I'm assuming Steve quit because he was over-caffeinating himself at work. But that's one of the mildly annoying things about this. He would not tell me why he quit. He used to buy 1/2 regular/ 1/2 decaf to put in his coffee maker. When you do that, you're drinking about the same amount of caffeine as you are in tea. But he will not go back to it at all, even for a "special occasion." And even though I know it's stupid, it does feel a little like a rejection, as if he suddenly stopped liking some movie star whose movies we used to go to. Mark, by the way, never liked coffee---or tea. He has never drunk any grown-up beverage. He doesn't drink water. He drinks Coke. So I think maybe when Steve and I were learning about each other, I attached more importance to the coffee because of that. Here's a grown-up, I said. And, more important, here's someone who likes what I like.

Oh, well. I should probably give it up anyway.