Soon the rain lets up, and so I sip my Red Rooster coffee in peace. These collards are so fine I don’t need the pepper sauce that I ritually use. I’m sucking my beans and greens down faster than I want because the once-drizzle is picking up now, compromising the integrity of my lunch.
He might look a bit Lab-ish, but he’s no water-lover. Max hovers between our chairs because it’s raining now. My pinto platter is not only accompanied by homemade chow chow, and those collards (when the waitress asked “With or without bacon?” I looked at her, at Max, at myself and wondered who’s kidding whom?) but also by a triangular wedge of cornbread, which is a little bitter because they clearly don’t use Rumford Baking Powder. In this moment, coming back from a trip to visit our daughter in Virginia, we’re sitting out front of the Floyd Country Store in Floyd, Virginia, in chairs provided for “wanted loiterers.” My wife nourishes herself with creamy tomato dill soup, a grilled cheese on wheat, and Coke. He’ll do anything for bacon and, truly, I understand. Unlike me back then, Max has to be asked only once to come to the table. We always sat for our supper when I was a boy growing up in Bessemer, Alabama. I pull out a meaty morsel and make him sit. He’s smelling it now, not the collards I’m slurping but the bacon they’re cooked in. My Carolina Wild Dog, Max, strains at his leash. It will be another form of coffee, though, that will bring me back to her. I’ll wonder about the distance between instant and ground, between black and au lait, between us, and our tastes. My Maxwell House will be “fresh ground” from a can, but my grandmother will have been dead by those same fifteen years. Two sips and I’m done for fifteen more years, until grad school and doctoral pre-lims and the stimulant of champions. Sometimes your elders are right: coffee does taste bitter. Not that I try the coffee either it will be years until, freezing to death at a ball game, I opt for coffee over hot chocolate since there won’t be any hot chocolate on this night at this little league ballpark. More often, the coffee complements her lunch of country vegetables and meat that, when I was a boy, I couldn’t bring myself to try. Often her coffee accompanies a buttered and heated slice of yesterday’s pound cake-as if any more butter were needed. When the pan of water is ready, she pours and then stirs in just a bit of sugar.
Except for the colder weeks when they are used for that still rare serving of hot tea, these cups are my grandmother’s exclusive property. She spoons two helpings into her open dull-green cup, one of a set of six. She lets me sniff the stuff inside, the coffee, in the only form I’ll know it for many years. I watch her remove the jar of Maxwell House from the top kitchen cabinet.
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