19 May 2008 by Shifrah Combiths
Coffee in my Life
He tapped the tongs against the rim of the Tupperware to shake off the excess powdered sugar, which floated into the snow pile of confectioner’s dust in which the candies lay. Smiling kindly behind his round glasses, he extended the tapped-off gummy candy, still trembling in the grip of the tongs, first to my sister; then he repeated the process and handed one to me. I always hoped for a red one, but if I happened to get a green or a yellow, it was alright. I knew we’d be back.
Our mother looked down at us and smiled. Coffee beans were roasting behind her, the mellow whoosh of the moving beans a sound fixed in our memories as belonging with the comforting scent of freshly roasted coffee – a scent that filled the small coffee shop on Noriega Street and even beckoned you into its warm embrace from the wet and foggy street outside.
After the candy ritual, Henry turned his attention to Mom. He filled her order from the bins of coffee that surrounded him. The hatch opened and out poured the beans into the waiting brown paper bag – our own piece of the roaster’s work. Henry was a small man, soft in manner, and gentle in tone. He always wore dress pants, a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a green apron. He exchanged niceties with us in Armenian-accented English, which added to his coffee shop’s other-worldliness, at least to me. Coffee was special and exotic, yet something as familiar to us as our mother who drank it while she worked at home.
I loved going with Mom to Henry’s to buy her coffee. I could barely see above the counter, but I could see Henry sprinkle a handful of sesame and honey candies into the bag that held Mom’s bag of coffee. We’d unwrap the cellophane from them in the car and crunch on them as we went off to do our next errand. The seeds would get stuck in our teeth and the honey cemented them in, the final cap to our coffee-getting tradition.
The next time I would see the coffee, it would be in my mother’s cream-colored mug. It wasn’t a round mug; it was like a hectagon with many, many sides all around, like panels. And it had a blue rim on the top. The coffee mug was always at her right side as she tapped away on the keyboard. This was the sound I woke up to and the sound I fell asleep to. The cadence of my childhood in our apartment on Taraval Street, it was the sound of a mother taking care of her children.
Sometimes I stood beside my mother as she worked. I would gaze into her cup of coffee as steam wafted from it, as she stared at the screen and her fingers danced on the keys. Sometimes she’d notice me there and stop her work to smile and kiss me on the cheek.
When I look into my cup now, I’m so grateful hers was there for me to see.