java

For all the years of my life, my mother made coffee the same way, in a Revereware percolator pot. I think she must have bought it right after she and Dad eloped and they set up housekeeping. 6 scoops of coffee, a pinch of salt over a filter in the drip basket of the pot, fill the pot to the bottom of the pour spout entrance inside the pot with ice cold tap water, set the basket on its stem pipe and base into the pot, put the top on, put the pot on an electric burner on high and sit around in the kitchen the 4 to 5 minutes it took for the water in the pot to come to a boil and start perking, wait until it was perking steadily, lower the heat to medium, set the timer for 12 and a half minutes and go about one's business until the timer went off, come in, remove the pot from the burner, let it sit for a minimum of 5 minutes, then remove the filter basket, dump the grounds and pour a cup of coffee.

To reheat, one was supposed to put the burner on medium and wait until the coffee got hot, checking from time to time, but not let it boil.

The coffee had to be Maxwell House.

It was an okay cup of coffee, never mud, not particularly bitter. Coffee isn't sweet. It's slightly bitter. It has a coffee taste. Nothing tastes like coffee.

However, as coffee goes, it was bland.

I have a sweet tooth. Most of the time I like coffee that tastes like really strong coffee-flavored hard candy. On the other hand, I *can and often *do drink coffee without sugar or without any diary product in it.

I used to sneak coffee into my milk when I was a child. I liked coffee in my milk on cereal. Particularly tasty was coffeed milk over Rice Krispies or Cheereos. On shredded wheat I didn't want anything but milk. I like that just like it was, crunchy and wet. I'd pour only as much milk as it took to get the stuff on top damp and eat quickly, because it was better crunchy than soggy.

However, I loved coffee. It was my favorite flavor of ice cream after peppermint. I liked coffee toffee. I liked coffee hard candies. I liked just about anything flavored with coffee, except shredded wheat.

By the time I went to Colombia for a couple of years of high school, I was having coffee with milk in it every morning. In Bogota, I had a large bowl (taza) of cafe con leche every morning, along with a hard roll with some butter as breakfast.

The school I attended had no cafeteria or vending machines. One had to bring lunch from home. Where the US kids I went to school with took lunches with sandwiches made form peanut butter or velveeta or bologna on white bread bought at the commissary for military and embassy personnel and their families with a bottle of Coca Cola or Pepsi; I'd have a roll with some local cheese and maybe some mustard or honey, depending on how sharp the cheese was -- or I'd have a slice of pork or beef or chicken (whatever we'd had for dinner the night before) along with a bag of plantain chips, maybe an orange or a cup of mango, and a thermos of hot coffee with sugar in it, but no milk.

Other kids might have been logy after lunch, but I was good to go. I wasn't inured to the caffeine in coffee and tea at 15 and 16 years of age. That came much, much later.

Coffee was bought green, recently picked, unroasted, at an open air market in downtown Bogota. The maid and cook made a huge shopping trip every Friday morning before they went to mass. They'd buy coffee, plaintains, maybe a live chicken, pork or beef, rice, oil, sugar, whatever fruit was in season, potatoes, onions, herbs, flour, several bags of oranges and other citrus, and whatever else Leonilde, the cook, thought would make good soups, entrees, snacks or desserts during the week. Eggs were bought from a little tienda (store) across the street, as were occasional postres (little desserts), dulces (candies, which my uncle loved), milk and cream. The shopkeeper kept chickens for eggs and sold them to neighbors, and she had a reliable purveyor of fresh milk, butter and cream and curds. This didn't taste like the homogenized milk US residents are used to. It was pasteurized, but it had a totally different taste. I kind of went off milk most of the time I lived there unless it had been heated and added to coffee, but I fell in love with cheese for the first time in my life. All the cheese made in that country was delicious, fresh or heavily aged, sharp or mild.

Every bite of food I had in Colombia over 2 years tasted out of this world because I could have it with coffee. FRESH coffee. Tintos (little espressos), tazas with milk, iced with a slice of lemon on the rim of the glass, if I wanted.

Rosa and Leonilde would by 8 kilos of coffee beans every week. That purchase took more time than all the others. They'd walk from vendor to vendor, eyeing the green beans, tasting a roasted bean which the vendor had roasted from each pile in which they were interested, haggling over pesos and watching with eagle eyes to be sure they got every gram of beans they paid for, before they were bagged.

They'd bring them home, put the roaster over a burner on the stove and roast a half kilo to a kilo at a time, hand cranking the beans as they cooked in the roaster until Leonilde's nose pronounced them done -- then they'd dump them on a cookie sheet to cool a bit. Coffee was ground by hand in a metal bur crank grinder as it was used. Thus, whether one was having tintos or they were making an entire drip pot of coffee (they didn't perk it, Leonilde said that ruined good coffee) for service for the family (including Rosa and Leonilde), What one got was roasted that morning, ground just before it was prepared, and it was smooth as silk, piquant as a good wine, smelled like heaven, never bit one's tongue, never left a nasty aftertaste, was never too weak or too strong. It had a slight kick to it, but it never left one's nerves jangling, refreshed one after a long day of housework, school work or office work.

My aunt and uncle and the maids drank tintos all day long. I had my cafe con leche in the morning, fueled up on drip coffee from my thermos at noon and the minute I got off the bus from school and walked the block home, I'd zoom into the kitchen and sit with the maids and talk while Rosa or Leonilde made us all three tintos and told me about the day in the neighborhood and house and I'd tell them about my day in school.

Dinner wasn't until 8:45 p.m. so a few hours later while I was doing homework, Rosa would pop in with another tinto. I drank water with dinner, had tinto or two after dinner and finished my homework, and I still slept like a baby. Coffee didn't keep me up. However it did perk me up.

My aunt smelled like coffee beans when she stepped out of the shower every morning, before she put on lotion or clothes. The house smelled of coffee just faintly, all the time.

To this day, when I smell coffee, I think of my aunt and uncle's house in Bogota. When I think of Colombia, I can smell coffee. When I dream of Colombia I wake up and expect to smell coffee, the dreams are still so intense.

I'll never return, but I still dream of Colombia.  The dream will always smell of coffee.