Black Coffee

For Christmas one year, the company put a big coffee machine with a guy to run it in the lobby.  This was the early '90s.  There were two options, espresso or cappuccino.  The kid in front of me had never had either, but it was free, so he was going to try it.  Times have changed.  We were so innocent in Big D back then.

He asked the guy running the machine which one he ought to get.  The machine man says, "Do you like the taste of coffee?"  "Not really," the kid says.  The man fixed him up with a cappuccino.  I got the espresso, of course.  I would have gotten a quad, but there were people behind me.  On the rare occasions I buy coffee at someplace like Starbucks, I'm usually drinking with someone else so I get an Americano because it lasts longer. 

For coffee, black is where it's at -- 5 reasons to take it all black. 

And old Steve Marriot thought so, too.  One of my favorites.

 

A lot of my memories are associated with coffee.  I remember driving all night from Tahoe through to Heber, Utah with a buddy of mine on the way back from California in the '70s.  We were young and not overly smart, and it was summer, and my car had no air conditioning.  We were getting tired of the heat.  I had been driving up the coast from Long Beach all that day, and, thinking I was invincible, I figured I could drive all night.  It might have worked better if we hadn't smoked quite so much reefer.  As it was, by 2:00 or 3:00AM, somewhere in the mountains, neither one of us could stay awake more than fifteen minutes at a time.  We were beat by the time we walked into that cafe in Heber and ordered breakfast.  I still remember those big china cups of coffee that the waitress wouldn't let us empty.  In some ways, it was the best part of the whole trip.