Coffee, the Miracle Drink

Coffee is good for you! At least that jolt you feel won’t harm you too much, if you don’t overdo it. So don’t feel guilty sharing a cup with your friends.

Maybe I’m exaggerating a bit by saying coffee is a miracle drink, but it sure feels that way in the morning when I brew my first batch.  I have a cheap cappuccino maker, which barely sputters the milk into foam. But who cares about foam?  The important thing is that the coffee elixir is saturated with caffeine.  All of my muscles come alive as I sip.  I feel the energy flowing through my veins.

One of the best things about making coffee is the empty can. I order my coffee in bags now, but I’ve saved plenty of cans to use to store my brushes.

We’ve had a lot of scares about coffee and caffeine throughout the years.  Doctors have warned me to stop drinking coffee because the caffeine worsened fibrocystic disease, for example.   Sometimes I’ve sworn it off, because I get caffeine withdrawal headaches.  But I always come right back to my old lover, warts and all.

I didn’t drink coffee until I was out of college (back in the 1970s, if you must know.)  I also rarely drank tea or colas.  Diet colas in those days were awful.  I rarely even ate chocolate, if you can believe that. So I wasn’t getting much, if any, caffeine.  I didn’t know what I was missing.

Some friends recognized the value of caffeine much earlier than I did.  Jan stayed up late into the night, fueled on Coke and sugar cookie dough, to finish art and sewing projects.  Some people took their caffeine in pill form.  No-Doze was popular right before finals.

Finally, coffee just clicked with me.  People had tried to get me interested before.  “Hey, little girl, want some coffee?”  But I always resisted.  We all have our breaking point. On a nonstop drive from Lawrence, Kansas, to visit Jan in Berkeley, California, my friend Kathy and I (click here to jump to a previous adventure with Kathy) made a pit stop in Salt Lake City. That city is NOT a mecca of caffeine consumption, but I needed some artificial energy to keep driving. I grabbed a cup of coffee at a diner.  Even I, the coffee virgin, knew it was swill, but I was hooked.   Perhaps, it was inevitable.  Most Americans drink coffee. My father used to joke that his father liked his coffee so thick you could float a spoon in it, and my father had a pot brewing all day long.  My son Matt mastered the fine art of brewing espresso.  Still, there are coffee abstainers even in my own family.

Jane E. Brody of the The New York Times discusses the health issues of coffee and caffeine in a recent article in a link here:  Sorting Out Coffee’s Contradictions

If you want to read all about coffee, go to www.answers.com and ask the right questions.  And don’t leave this post until you check out my photograph below of a chicken under a coffee tree.

This chicken scratches for dinner under coffee and banana trees near Le Tigre National Park in Honduras. The red cherry covering the coffee bean is edible. I tried one. It was slightly sweet. Tropical highlands are ideal for growing coffee. Perhaps, the land would find a better use if we all weren’t so addicted to coffee.