10 An Essay — ‘The Search For The Taste Of Coffee.’
AN ORDINARY LIFE OF A SEVENTY-PERCENTER
Interlude: An Essay — ‘The Search For The Taste Of Coffee.’
My friend JPC (Boet) figures largely in the next chapter. Thinking about him brings to mind something from the days when I boarded with his grandparents in Greytown — the taste of the early morning cup of coffee poured from the coffee pot that stood permanently on the side of the wood stove, ready to dispense the delicious nectar at any time. The morning coffee ritual is, of course, the experience of most farmer’s — we had it on our own farm, Success, near Seven Oaks — but the smell and taste that springs to mind is from those days in Boet’s grandparents’ home, something which I experienced again in the odd weekends when I went there with Boet during the year I will be writing about in the next issue. In a sense, the search for the taste of coffee represents the constant search that I think most of us are occupied in all our lives as we seek to recapture pleasurable moments from the past. I wrote this essay some years ago for our E-zine, Southtown Magazine.
Here then is
“The Search For The Taste Of Coffee.”
The knocking is faint, and before you answer, the door opens and the voice says, “Coffee! Time to get up!” Exit the person, the door shuts and you lie there, hopelessly not wanting to wake up, clutching at the last few minutes of sleep. Ten minutes pass, you cannot, dare not, linger any lomger. You sit up and reach a hand out for the cup on the table and bring it to your lips. Your nose is assailed by that scent, your lips sample that warm liquid, and your palate giggles at that taste! The taste of farm-style coffee is now etched upon your memory and will go with you for the rest of your life.
You grow up, you finish school, you enter into life — and all your life you look for that taste again, that special taste, but it eludes you. In a whole succession of cups of coffee, in hotels, in coffee shops, in after-meeting coffee encounters — even in your own home, in the coffee you yourself have selected and purchased — you come upon something like it — but never exactly like it — only occasionally, and that by pure chance. You cannot make it, buy it, or blend it because it belonged to a certain place in a certain time in a certain circumstance; grains from a particular coffee bean imported and sold in trading stores of that era. You are marked for life with a taste you cannot satisfy, except, as I say, you may experience something reminiscent of it now and again by pure chance.
The chances come unexpectadly. The other day my coffee was beside my chair and I was engrossed in a book. Dorothy said “You haven’t finished your coffee. It’s getting cold.”
“Thanks,” I said and reached for the cup. As it came to my lips, there was the scent, the temperature, the taste! — and I drank it slowly, revelling in every last drop of it.
That taste of coffee is something I learnt in early life, and remembered for ever. There is something more vital, stemming from a much earlier stage in our existence, which is more haunting, something eternal which once resided in our soul, a self-existent truth, which we can sense, but which just eludes us. The poet Wordsworth wrote of this in his poem ‘Ode On Intimations Of Immortality From Recollections Of Early Childhood’ [paraphrased and cropped]:-
“There was a time when meadow, grove and stream, the earth, and every common sight, to me did seem appareled in celestial light, the glory of a dream. It is not now as it [was in former times] — turn whereso’er I may, by night or day, the things which I have seen I now can see no more. …..
Heaven lies about us in our infancy! ….. The Youth, who daily further from the east must travel, is by ‘the vision splendid on the way attended’ ….. At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.”
I have read of it described as race-memory — memory planted in the human mind. We are born with it, and delight in it as children without realising it, because it is ‘just us.’ As we get older it fades, and we experience it as a hunger in our soul. We yearn for it without fully knowing what it is. It is a vague intuition of a better home, a better existence. We get a glimpse of just the shadow of it, the mere suspicion of it’s presence, in moments which flash across the screen of our mind, and quickly disappear. Yet these are the intimations, the stirrings, that keep us continuously ‘looking for something’. We can crowd the hunger out with ceaseless activity, endless achievement, but suddenly, in an unguarded moment, the sense of something missing resurfaces.
But, just like the taste of that cup of coffee, neglected and cooling by my side, moments do come when we almost understand what it is we are looking for, moments when we have the taste of ‘truth’ in our mouths. These are not moments that we can create for ourselves. They are often triggered by something quite unconnected with our present thoughts, a sight, a movement, a smell, a sound, a breeze that brings back a remembrance of that freedom we knew as children.
These are good things that come as ‘gifts from above’, to all of us, and we can lock them in to become part of our present existence. The secret, if there is anything secret about this, is to be willing to have it, to recognise the ‘moving’, deep down in our being, readying us for it, and then to embrace it with open arms. The truth that the moment brings needs to be deliberately taken, not merely accepted, because it signals change, and change is a thing which most of us fear.
It is, in a real sense, ‘becoming as a little child’ in respect of our feelings and emotions. If we do not take the moment, we will never know what we have missed — (you won’t know what my coffee tasted like, because it never came your way!)– but when we do take it to ourselves, we will know the pleasure of it. Is it really so hard to let the child-that-we-were live in us?
Aaahh — life, free life!
