Keep the Coffee Comimg

The weather hasn’t changed. We tend to stay around the low 30’s, today we’re 30° exactly. We have a slight breeze. It spins the hanging brown leaves on the oaks. I still have trash. I also still have a bit of Christmas piled on the table. I need to bring more bins upstairs. I should finish today though I’ve said that every day for the last few days. I think I have a severe form of winter lethargy.

My high school graduation was outside, the first ever at my school. The girls wore white, the boys green. The boys sat on one side, the girls on the other. I could see my father and mother from my seat. During the ceremony, the scholarships were given out. I got a couple, but it is the first one I remember. After I got back to my seat, envelope in hand, I looked to my parents expecting applause or a way to go, girl. I got neither. Instead, there was my father asking, “How much? How Much?” I ignored him.

The first time I heard a rooster crowing was in Ghana, on a very early morning. It became a significant event. When I returned to Ghana, a rooster crowed outside my window on my first morning. I thought of it as a welcome.

In Ghana I learned to operate a motorcycle. It was a Honda 90, which was what I could afford, barely afford, from my living allowance. I bought it in Tamale, a little over 100 miles away from Bolga, learned how to operate it from the dealer then left for home. One road was all I took. It was straight up from Tamale to Bolga. I stopped a couple of times for water and to stretch my legs. It was a long ride and on the left. It was a significant event. I rode over a 100 miles, my first ever trip on a motorcycle.

My creative juices, my muses, are among the missing. I think they left me adrift so they could go somewhere warm. I have been sitting a while on the couch hoping for inspiration which hasn’t come. One dog is asleep on each side of me. Nala is snoring. They care nothing about my plight. I guess it is time for a stream of Coffee memory consciousness.

When I was a kid, I lived in a neighborhood of duplexes. In the duplex next to mine lived a photographer, his wife and I remember a son though there could have been more children. I remember seeing the father’s photos in the town paper. The wife was German. This was significant. Back then almost all the fathers were veterans of WWII. What I didn’t know was the wife was being called names like Kraut by one of the neighbors. The husband confronted him and the two men had a fight. I was right in the middle of the watchers. We followed them from yard to yard, lawn to lawn. We looked like people following golfers from hole to hole. That was the most monumental event, and its memory lived on. For years, the question, “Do you remember the fight? sometimes popped up in conversations.

This next memory occurred earlier than the memory above but popped into my head later. The field and the dead old tree trunk near my house were always a part of my memory until the horrific day they were cleared and then later replaced by apartments for the elderly. We kept our boundaries, them and us. We never played there, and they were never on my street then it happened. An ambulance, fire truck and two police cars came speeding up the hill their horns and alarms blaring. It was loud enough to get us out of our houses. I was young so this was exciting. We followed the cars and stood on the sides of the road where they were parked. I remember the crowd talking. Now I’d describe their conversations as speculations, guesses, and inside information which ran rampant. They brought a lady out on the stretcher, I could see her head, but her condition didn’t register with me. My most vivid memory of that day is not the lady but rather the excitement from the fire engine being on the street and from seeing the firemen carrying a hose and what looked like a Klingon weapon. I found out much later her robe had caught on fire from her stove and had burned her. I never heard anymore.

These are two rare memories. They just sort of showed up today.