FIRST PERSON | Today is a joyous holiday. No, I don’t mean Rosh Hashanah (though a very happy New Year to everyone, Jewish or not; we can all do with a fresh start now and then). I mean happy National Coffee Day. I was already celebrating and did not even realize it as I downed my daily dose, and now I have the perfect excuse for an ode to the beverage that kicks the sleepies out of my brain.
With mythical origins as delightful as coffee itself, credit of its discovery going to caffeinated goats, coffee has given us thousands of years of mornings filled with, in the words of Dolly Parton, “cups of ambition.” And that is coffee: liquid motivation, a morning leg up, and a message to the brain to fire up the old synapses.
It’s gone from hero to villain and back again, with coffee being fantastic, to coffee being bad for you, to where it is now, a possible reduction of risk of several diseases, including Parkinson’s, type 2 diabetes, gallstones and colon cancer (and it is on this health information that I prefer to land. You can stop doing coffee research now. Unless you find more benefits. Then please, feel free to continue). It can jumpstart a workout and may even lower the risk of depression in women.
And coffee is ingrained in the American psyche; it is the quiet underpinning of so much of our culture. In old black and white movies, it’s what our sleekly hatted and gloved heroine orders at a counter no matter the time of day or night; it’s what is offered to everyone, including the police investigating the murder committed by their overly accommodating host back in the golden age of film noir. Now characters in TV shows and movies hold those ubiquitous white cups with the sleeves around them and we all know what that means, what’s inside the cup, and why they need it.
Thank you, coffee, for your smooth start to my days, for the way you get my ideas brewing and my fingers typing them. Thank you for your warm sense of ritual which, for me, means standing at the faucet daydreaming as I get just the right amount of water; measuring the beans in accordance to my complicated and ineffable formula; the noise of the grinder; the smell of the fresh grounds.
And the beep when the coffee is ready.
Happy National Coffee Day, which so fittingly falls on Rosh Hashanah. While Rosh Hashanah offers a yearly new beginning, coffee gives us a daily one.