Of Snakes Sex Playing in the Rain, Random Thou Page 4

  I was in a gourmet coffee shop recently, one of those chain outfits that are more common today than phone booths were in the past, although they’re far less useful. They must have had fifty different coffees available in bean and ground form. If you didn’t see what you wanted, they’d mix it up for you. I looked at the list for a long time, then I went to the counter. “I’d like a cup of coffee,” I said. “What kind?” he said. “Just coffee,” I said. “Make sure it’s fresh.”

  He was bewildered. He started telling me in alphabetical order all the names of the coffees they sold. I stopped him when he got to the Ds. “I just want a cup of coffee,” I said. “Just plain, black, hot, coffee.”

  He consulted with the manager then returned. “We don’t sell that here,” he said. “You need to go to a café for that.”

  I did. And I didn’t regret it. His coffee was $3.75 a cup. The café only charged two bits, and refills were free. I’ll bet he didn’t give free refills with all his fancy coffees. But I’ll also bet it didn’t occur to him that café means coffee. His shop just meant fancy. Coffee isn’t fancy; it’s democratic, remember?

  This isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate a good cup of chicory now and then, or that I don’t like different kinds of coffee generally. But I don’t seek out these things on a regular basis. I too much enjoy the aroma, the taste, the heat and the overall experience of a plain old cup of truck-stop joe, made with cold water and perked until it’s almost—but not quite—boiling when it hits the lip, strong enough to lift the spirits, black enough to lighten the darkest night.

  I also don’t think much of decaffeinated coffee. People who order “a cup of decaf” are the same sorts of people who eat “lite mayonnaise” and “chicken fajitas”, whatever that is. They say silly things like “hold the onions” and think a bowl of lettuce is a meal. I acknowledge that some people have health problems and have to eat this way, and I sympathize with them, but people who have those problems don’t choose to have them. So why do perfectly healthy people deprive themselves of real coffee? They may as well order colored water, heated and laden with sugar and cream. It achieves the same effect as a flour tortilla, which, I think, resembles cardboard with freckles. Coffee without caffeine isn’t coffee. You may as well have tea.

  When I visit friends overnight, unless I know they are confirmed coffee people, my first stop is in the kitchen. I seek out their coffee maker (I’m not picky as to type) and then make sure that the color of the can is red—not green. If they have no red, I inquire about the distance to the nearest café and tell them I’ll be absent in the morning. “I have to have my coffee,” I say.

  I’ll put up with your cats, endure your children, and stand outside in the rain and smoke. But I’m damned if I’ll drink decaf and call it coffee.

  Coffee is addictive, of course. Caffeine is a drug. Drinking coffee is a vice, but it’s one of the more innocuous vices human beings share, which, I guess, is why I have trouble tolerating Meddlers who don’t approve of it. Switching totally to decaf might prevent some horrible thing from happening, but it somehow would negate the point of drinking coffee in the first place. People who drink decaf are cheating. They’re fooling themselves.

  I feel the same way about people who drink (and serve) instant coffee. Instant coffee should be outlawed for use except in cases of extreme emergency, such as being confronted with decaf. Instant coffee forbids the ritual of preparing the pot, of measuring the grounds, of pouring the water, of waiting carefully for the moment when it’s ready, of savoring the first fresh cup of the morning.

  Making a cup of instant coffee is too much like making tea. Drinking instant coffee is like believing politicians’ “sound bites” on TV. They’re handy, easy to digest, and rarely make a mess. But they rarely mean anything, either. Instant coffee is frequently lumpy—and bitter—as well. So are most politicians.

  ###

  I don’t know much about the history of coffee. I do know that during the War Between the States, Union troops along the rivers of Northern Virginia would build tiny rafts and float coffee across the Potomac to their mortal enemies in exchange for Rebel tobacco. They understood the necessity of indulging such vices when faced with imminent death. I know that American soldiers in two world wars and Korea and Vietnam were provided with coffee as a “top priority” item from the Quartermaster Corps. Second only to arms and munitions, it was higher in priority than prophylactics and cigarettes; higher, even, than food. Armies may march on their stomachs, as the saying goes, but after they’ve hurried up and are waiting, they want their coffee. Without it, they might mutiny.

  I’m not well-educated in the science of coffee. To be honest, I’m not all that interested. A few years ago I read that the coffee we buy has as many ground up cockroaches in it as it does ground up beans. If that’s true, I don’t want to know it. I like it the way it is, and I don’t want anybody fussing with it.

  It’s enough for me that coffee is available. It’s served almost everywhere food and beverages are sold, and it can be bought in the smallest of groceries, the seediest of gas stations, the greasiest of greasy spoons. Sometimes that’s the best coffee around. Sometimes it’s the best because it’s the only coffee around. Many’s the night in my experience that the only coffee around was the best coffee.

  Almost anyone can make coffee, particularly in the new drip makers that have directions printed on the lid. It’s hard to foul up coffee, but every coffee drinker knows where the best cup can be found in any city, and there’s no greater compliment to pay anyone than to say, “He/she makes a great cup of coffee.” Coffee making is not the province of any race, creed, or color. As I said, coffee is democratic.

  Once I went with a group of young people to the mountains on a weekend hike. The first morning, they awoke to find me happily boiling coffee over the campfire in a regular pot. When my mixture threatened to spill over, I poured in cold spring water to settle the grounds. They were astonished, then skeptical, but they finally gave in. The aroma got to them, you see, the smell. They had never had coffee that hadn’t been perked, brewed, or dripped from some high-tech device. What I gave them was strong—too strong, really. But they drank it, and they pronounced it the best they’d ever had.

  I doubt that it was. Coffee always tastes better outdoors. Besides, it was the only coffee around.

  I may not remember my first cup of coffee, but I do remember my last. It was only a few minutes ago. I am sensitive to the fact of an emptying pot, and I am eager to be the first to pour from a fresh one. I find it to be an honorable vice, a pleasurable friend, and a solace in times when I’m alone and in need of contemplation. I also find it to be one of the few things I can share with people without being afraid of giving offense. Unless I smoke, of course.

  I hope I shall always feel the way I do about coffee, and I hope the Meddlers leave it alone and spend their time finding things wrong with broccoli and tofu. I’m not sure why coffee is, only that it is, and that it’s one of the few constants in life that can always be counted on.

  THE BOOK THAT SCARRY BUILT:

  BEING IN PART A DISCOURSE ON THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ROLE OF CHILDREN IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

  “When the first baby laughed for the first time,

  the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about,

  and that was the beginning of fairies.”

  —J.M. Barrie

  I hate Richard Scarry. More precisely, I hate Richard Scarry’s books. They are, I am convinced, born of an insidious intent: to drive parental readers insane with insipid inanity and irritating irrelevancy. Scarry doubtlessly takes a devious pleasure in concocting them and populating them with hundreds—thousands, it sometimes seems—of idiotic, vacuous characters engaged in a bedlam of moronic activities while wearing stupid smiles on their wide, lunatic faces. Their design, clearly, is to irk and vex a reader to the point of utter distraction. What I learned, though, is that, for a parent, they’re as unavoidable as dirty diap
ers, and they’re just as obnoxious.

  You see, I once had this vision. As I anticipated the birth of our two children, I could see myself comfortably seated in an overstuffed chair, my offspring warmly wrapped in woolen nightclothes on my lap, snug, fuzzy slippers on their little feet, their eyes all aglow with fascination as I narrated tales of Mother Goose, Aesop, or—joy of joys!—Winnie the Pooh to them from heavy, leather-bound tomes lovingly removed from the oaken bookshelves of their rooms. Then, my vision continued, when they grew older—say three or four—we would graduate to children’s versions of the classical myths, to stories of Odysseus, Pegasus, and Jason and the Argonauts. I even located a volume of stories from Shakespeare for children to save for them when they were ready. Well, that was my vision.

  Some years later, the average evening found me fixed between three-year-old Wesley and two-year-old Virginia, not on a comfortable chair, but on our broken-down old divan, covered with stains from childhood messiness, the only piece of furniture we owned that was large enough to accommodate all three of us and the mandatory presence of their collection of dolls, stuffed animals, blankets, and other companioning paraphernalia brought along to that period of time Virginia indelibly named, “Weadbook!”

  Neither child is snugly wrapped in traditional nightclothes. Wesley sports an oversized tee-shirt emblazoned with the faded logo of the local university; Virginia is squeezed into an undersized pair of baby-doll pajamas that she steadfastly defends from consignment to the bottomless pit of the Goodwill bag. Both are fed and bathed, and neither is anywhere close to as weary and ready for the day to end as I am.

  Their eyes are not aglow with fascination. Instead, if they’re not bickering with one another, they’re totally ignoring the tales I’m trying to read to them and digging their little noses into whatever other books have been selected for the night’s program. They frequently interrupt my droning with requests for water, juice, and information on topics I had no idea they were even aware of, all occasionally punctuated with a squabble about which book Daddy will read aloud to himself next.

  There are no leather-bound volumes, either. Rather, the books of childish choice are dog-eared paperbacks, slashed and torn, often brought to me in pieces with whole sections missing. Any suggestion that they be thrown out and replaced by selections which might yet contain some semblance of plot or story is met with teary objections as if I’d proposed strangling the family pooch.

  By far, their favorite books are those which have been “colored in” so much that half the narrative is obscured, have more than half their pages stuck together with some anonymous foodstuff, or have found their way into the toilet or bathtub more than once. Whole sentences are frequently obliterated by some tiny finger’s shredding. Not infrequently, information carefully offered by the author pertains to a picture on an opposing page that has long since been rendered pulp by diminutive demolitionists who suddenly are all eyes and ears and demand to know where the ducky, chicky, or lamby the narrative mentions has gone to.

  Finally, the stories are not fascinating accounts of mythical beings and amazing creatures so dear to my childhood reading fantasies. They aren’t even the mildly entertaining formulae offered by the Muppets, the Sesame Street Gang, or even the media-born creatures from the movie studios of Warner Brothers or Disney. No. The favorite of favorites, the book of books, the primary selection for virtually every evening’s “Weadbook!” is at least one of the loathsome tales of Richard Scarry.

  Books in Print lists dozens of volumes by this celebrated author of children’s literature. They come in all shapes and sizes from the extra-large, hardbound volumes to tiny paperbacks that will literally fit into a shirt pocket. Each boasts a different title; each offers a new approach to the same old stuff; and each is just like the others in several annoying ways designed to drive any parent to the brink of gibbering lunacy.

  First of all there are the illustrations, both the kind and the number—especially the number. Scarry peoples his books with cats, dogs, pigs, chickens, mice, rabbits, worms, monkeys, and the odd hippo or rhino among other miscellaneous fauna. These characters are garbed in more or less human clothing—just enough costume to obscure the species in question and to elicit queries such as, “What kind of animal is that, Daddy?” at the rate of forty times per page. Not only are these weird creatures living in regular houses and performing all sorts of improbable chores and duties—and more often than not, botching the job with unimaginable stupidity—they are also surrounded by thirty or fifty drawings of other people-like animals who are doing even more inane and—to my way of thinking—irrelevant tasks that have absolutely nothing to do with anything the “main” characters are doing. In one book, for example, almost seventy-two humanoid-animals are engaged in at least two hundred activities around the Pig Family who, as usual, aren’t doing anything in the least remarkable or even logical.

  Properly read, then, the typical Richard Scarry book takes about two hours per page to get through, that is, if the child/auditor is preliterate. If the parent/reader is confronted with an audience consisting of a toddler or preschooler, a few days might be added to that rate.

  Thus, our evening “Weadbook!” sessions go something like this:

  DADDY: [reading] “The Pig Family passes a construction site . . .”

  WESLEY: What’s a construction site?

  VIRGINIA: What’s that chicken doing, Daddy?

  WESLEY: He’s driving a road-grader.

  VIRGINIA: Where’s a wode-gwader?

  WESLEY: He’s going to hit that doggie on the tricycle.

  VIRGINIA: Where’s a wode-gwader?

  DADDY: [indicating the page] Right there. No, I think he’ll miss the doggie.

  WESLEY: Can doggies drive tricycles and road-graders?

  VIRGINIA: Where’s a doggie?

  DADDY: [pointing] Right there, Virginia. I don’t think doggies—

  VIRGINIA: I don’t see a wode-gwader! Where’s the wode-gwader?

  WESLEY: What’s that kitty doing? Is he going to ride the tricycle, too?

  VIRGINIA: [growing frantic] Where’s the wode-gwader?

  WESLEY: Is the kitty going to hit the doggie?

  DADDY: There’s the road-grader, Virginia. What kit—

  WESLEY: Is the kitty going to crash?

  DADDY: No, I don’t think—

  VIRGINIA: [delighted] Wode-gwader!

  WESLEY: Why is that airplane upside down?

  VIRGINIA: I want to see the doggie, [crying] Where’s the kitty?

  DADDY: There’s the doggie, Virginia. The kitty—

  VIRGINIA: Doggie!

  WESLEY: What are the mice doing?

  VIRGINIA: Where’s upside down?

  DADDY: That’s an airplane. That’s upside down. The mice—

  WESLEY: Where’s Goldbug?

  DADDY: That’s another book—

  VIRGINIA: Where’s Godbug? I want to see Godbug!

  WESLEY: [patiently and wisely] That’s another book, Virginia.

  DADDY: [hurriedly turning the page] Well, now the Pig Family is—

  WESLEY: Can we read the Goldbug book, now?

  VIRGINIA: [crying] I want to see Godbug! I want to see Godbug! Where’s Godbug?

  In addition to the multitude of peripatetic, useless characters who crowd the margins of every page of Scarry’s books, he also includes a cast of regulars: Goldbug, Bananas Gorilla, Mistress Mouse, Lowly Worm, and Officer Flossy, among others. These singular worthies figure prominently in certain books, and they have a nagging tendency to turn up as supporting cast in other volumes, as well. The result, of course, is that when they appear with less than top billing in Scarry’s other elementary dramas, performing no less idiotically than the thousand or so other characters in his chorus-menagerie, they have the distracting habit of taking stage center away from whatever dog or cat has been officially assigned the leading role in the story at hand. This occasions much squirming by my tiny audience, and the demands for an immediate return t
o the star system in children’s literature are loud and long.

  Another major problem with Scarry’s books is the plots—or the lack of them. The insipid activities of these mentally deficient characters are enough to addle any brain, but Scarry ensures adult doddering by supplementing such inanity as a pig mistaking a steam shovel for the family car or a rabbit becoming incurably (but painlessly) stuck in hot, sticky tar on a new roadway, by asking a series of rhetorical questions: “That wasn’t very smart of him, was it?” “She’ll have to be more careful next time, won’t she?” “Oh, he’s a naughty dog, isn’t he?” Only a parent/reader of Scarry’s books knows the incredible frustration of trying to answer to any degree of satisfaction such questions for a child/auditor:

  —Why did he do that, Daddy?

  —Because he’s naughty, I guess.

  —Why’s he naughty?

  —Because he just is, I guess.

  —Will he get a spanking?

  —No, but if he’s not careful, Richard Scarry may put him into another book.

  The unplotted action winds on for pages and pages, and if the parent/reader is lucky enough to fool the child/auditor by avoiding explanations of the activities of about half the characters depicted on each page and can manage to turn rhetorical questions into absolute, declarative, unchallengeable sentences, then the book can be completed sometime before a toddler reaches puberty.

  Each of Scarry’s books ends with some sort of surprise denouement that should be perfectly obvious from page one where the “hints” and leading questions—“Why do you suppose he did that?”—start. But they always manage to conclude just illogically enough to titillate youthful minds and make adult readers feel like brainless fools for not having seen it coming all along.