Three years later

 In the season of eternal status, where spring would always give way to summer in the most predictable ways, as it was in the 1920s, the 40s, the 60s, and here today in 78, it did not seem to change. I got off the bus that came down the hill every day, and I knew what to expect. 

The summer pressed on. Inside of me however an awakening was underway. I could tell that behind the summer music, things were never going to be the same. A bouncy and complex jazz run had laced the airwaves and it boasted sharpness. There were signs that time was moving, which also meant that changes were in the wind. 

The late summer movies gave way to the atmosphere of the fall background. The smell of new clothing, and paper, and the hum of fluorescent lights overhead in a building constructed in 1906 gave way to gravity that could never be denied. In a moment you can learn so much about yourself. 

As the leaves changed color, we were mobile again for the first time in two years. The freedom brought about uncertainty. As I look back on this, I realize that this was a small example of a phobia that could return to me in 1991 and in 2022. Sometimes it takes a long time to find the answers to your questions.

I woke up, and things were new. I was new. I was in control now. I was viable and it was great and weird at the same time. In only 4 seasons such as this one, things would be more different than anyone, anywhere could ever imagine.

Three years later, we are on the 36-month merry-go-round. Everything always looks the same. But somewhere on the piano keys in the smoke-filled VFW hall, the player makes a fatal slip of the hand, and a wrong note echoes off into the night. With that, there is a shockwave promising change we did not see coming or even could have imagined. It will look like freedom for sure. It will write books and songs and people will be born. But it is not freedom, it is worse than death, and we will live to regret it.

Three years after this, on a subzero morning, reality is stifled for a moment and my brain even paints what I think I should see. Suddenly, the parachute opens and tears me back from my manufactured vision, forcing me to see how unfair the world is. Innocence notwithstanding, crushed you will be whether you deserve it or not. There it is, my ride is here.

The bridges of the Intercoastal Waterway slap the tires in rhythm with the music and the hot summer breeze. Everything is different. There is sand in my bed and sand in my dreams. There will never be a feeling like the one I feel now. Never. Here there will be nothing but bridges and they are everywhere. I would never trade this for anything. 

And then three years later, the sun rises over the severity of the Adirondacks and I see it as if it were my first time ever. I start the days slowly, resuming what the bitter cold day took from me back in 84, but soon, my impulse takes over and I am living nothing short of an action thriller, that sometimes I lose minutes or even hours of understanding about where I am or what I am doing.

Raw survival instinct kicks in and coupled with the life I have lived the last three years, I know I have something rarely ever imparted to anyone. The ride gets faster and more wild; that is when we jump and succeed. It is a new day and that is good, but things turn dark the following year and I find myself out on the fringe again, more than ever now.

It has been three years since I journeyed north, and it was time to go south again. The things you do when you have completely lost yourself and your mind. It was here that I was destroyed at the wall of creation in a violent blast! Rage coursed through me and revenge was all I could think of. But as the hours passed, I knew it was all me. The ride had to stop here and now, and somehow, it did. Big painful changes had to be made. There were so many of them. Some still hurt today.

What happened next defies who I am and yet defines who I am too. The one thing that I feared the most, the one thing I never did, denounced, and would never be a part of, I accepted, embraced, and watched it unfold like a novel that I was reading and not actually living in.

Three years later, Neil Young's Harvest Moon came out and in the notes of the music, I could feel that everything up and around the bend, was about to change. It changed in a very big way, forever. 

It was a very dark day three years later, standing at the bedside of my father learning that time was up, this was all we would have. It wasn’t right but it was happening anyway. The days that followed were even darker, I was sure I would never see the light of day.

Three years passed and I found myself in a whole new life despite not moving from where I stood. It was timeless and daring. Voices came in over the stratosphere warning that the end of everything was coming. We could never make it back. Suddenly I woke up in a dark parking lot, music was playing and change was in the air. As soon as I heard the music, I knew.

Three years later, Warren was gone, Johnny was gone too and I had a beautiful son. Everything was new and it made everything else that came before seem like it had all been a movie that I had been watching in a dark theater on a sunny afternoon. 

Three years later, there were two beautiful boys in my life. It kept getting better. Late in the year, affliction came knocking. Undiscovered country to navigate, to fight, and to survive.

Three years later, I sat in the hospital reading Are You My Mother to Noah hundreds of times, praying that he would be able to read it too someday. I walked the basement of the hospital with Liam exploring, spending time with him, hoping that soon we could be together again.

Three years later everything changed in the war. Where we were stationed, and how we were equipped. New normal. 

Three years later I am still climbing out of the mire of a life lived in a defensive posture. Never figured it out but I knew where to go.

Three years later I got perspective on the trails. I was starting to learn that discomfort is a diploma and one we should not deny. The biggest trial was coming. 

Three years later I fell on the dying grass that was recently only lush and green. I could not get up and I could not move. Everything that I was got turned upside down and spilled all over the ground. I did not know how to put everything together. A spaceship descended from the sky, and a woman got out and lifted me to my feet. She looked at me and asked, what would you do if you were not afraid?

Three years later I am sitting here writing this. I never noticed this unique rhythm that has played out here. Some days, I feel like I have come a long way. Other days I feel like I have not moved in 30 years.

The Coffee Chronicles

 

 I like to hike. I also love my coffee. While I can get away with choking down instant coffee on the trail, there is nothing like freshly brewed coffee to make that experience so much more robust. In 2018 when the Crawford family was hiking the Appalachian Trail, Ben Crawford the dad, mentioned people that he saw using an Aeropress coffee maker and made the statement I feel like I’m missing out on something.

Ben's words intrigued me and I had no choice but to buy one on Amazon. If you don’t know what an AeroPress is,  the best way to describe it is like a wide syringe that holds coffee grounds and water and after a rest time allows you to push the water out into your cup using the syringe plunger. I then took the aero press with me on a family canoe trip and impressed myself and others with this amazing coffee. 

Three years have passed. Many pieces of hiking gear that I bought three years ago have not been used in quite some time. When it comes to cooking, this can be very detrimental. When I don’t practice all the time with my food preparation for the trail, it usually ends with me taking a homemade backpacking meal with me, only to take two bites out of it and declare it inedible. So now for two days, I have been making my morning coffee in the aero press as opposed to my normal French press. And I am currently struggling to make that perfect cup of coffee. In the first 20 minutes of my day, believe me, so many times I want to turn back and run to the safety of my French press.

But I am determined. I will scrape and claw my way into fantastic coffee making in this aero press device. In doing so I will become a mentor in the art of making coffee in this way. My motives are selfish but how many others will be thankful that I was?

A Walk Down Memory Lane

It is more than selfish, however. When you think of all the different ways that you have had coffee. In my generation, people perked coffee in electric percolators on tabletops, glass Pyrex percolators on the stove, and aluminum percolators on the stove that were sold for a dollar and a half in the grocery store. Then the mid-1970s saw the introduction of the Mr. coffee automatic drip coffee maker. To my recollection, this made a slightly higher than a lukewarm cup of coffee that tasted somewhat like coffee and a lot like plastic. In the first half a decade it was out it was a novelty and no one really took it seriously. It was a copycat of the Bun-style coffee makers that you saw at diners.

I remember at 13 years old I could make coffee in the morning on the old gas and gas stove while my mom got ready for work. She trained me well and I knew exactly when to turn the burner down so as not to boil over the coffee. To this day perking coffee on a stovetop is still a fine way to brew a cup.

During the 1980s the coffee maker became more prevalent and taken seriously. Advances in technology helped with the plastic taste and the temperature. Perhaps a sacrificing of standards coupled with the world getting busier helped.  

The War

By the time we got to 1990, I found myself shipped out to the Middle East during the Gulf War. I procured a large bottle of instant Nescafé instant and a four-dollar Chinese cookstove that burned anything except gasoline and used the equivalent of mop strings to wick flames through a vented double-wall heat tube to create a blue flame. This type of stove is better known today as the butterfly stove and I still have one in the garage for sentimental reasons.

In the desert, I’ve seen people make coffee in many ways including on dried camel poop. Believe me when someone says "sorry about the coffee" I can honestly say, “I’ve had worse“.

Diabolical Atrocities

Although tolerance in different stages of quality of the coffee will change with your situation at the time, there is one thing that is completely unacceptable when it comes to coffee. I am serious as a heart attack here. It is never acceptable not to have it. When all of the grand plans are made whether you are an individual going for a backpacking trip or going out on a family camping trip in your car or a business executive traveling from hotel to hotel or a national guard unit away at Fort Devens for the weekend in 1993, you will have coffee. No excuses. No apologies. No tolerance. Even if you were a Lieutenant in charge of a platoon in the United States Army, it is your responsibility to make sure that the people in your command have this one thing before you ask them to do anything else.

The lieutenant in this story in my opinion completely failed in his life mission. That Sunday morning when we were awakened from sleep made to sit in Army trucks on a cold gray Sunday morning in the Springtime, and sit there and wait for whatever it is we were waiting for. They pathetically handed us a stupid MRE (Meal Ready to Eat)  through the window. Again, absolutely not acceptable. If you have ever drunk the disgusting package of instant coffee that comes with an MRE with cold or lukewarm water, you would know that this is not coffee.

I don’t know if anybody remembers who was with me that day but I took a vow that I have held to for the rest of my life since that day. I promised that as long as I was around, the people around me would never go without coffee in the morning, never in the rest of my life. Thus far I have not broken that vow.

Y2K

In the aforementioned Gulf War, during the push into western Iraq, we basically lived the Gilligan's Island "3 Hour Tour" scenario.  A 36-hour mission that really took days taught me better than anything ever before about the personal responsibility to be prepared.  At the tail end of the '90s the new millennium was coming and maybe, so was Y2K.  In the summer of 1999, a supercell thunderstorm assaulted Claremont New Hampshire where I lived at the time.  A storm strong enough to take down the power for 4 days in West Claremont and level the gazebo on the town common.  I worked in White River Junction Vermont at the time.  On the day of the storm, I already know that my house at the top of East Green Mountain had no power (and unfortunately had an electric stove).  I decided as I drove down Washington St which is the local business district in Claremont, I would stop at one of the local fast-food restaurants because they did have power.

When I walked into each restaurant, it appeared that riots had ensued and people were screaming and having tantrums!  McDonalds looked like someone purposely emptied the napkin and straw dispensers and maybe even a trash can onto the open floor.  They were out of food and could not take many orders for popular items.  The patrons did not understand in a peaceful manner.  I moved onto KFC.  They actually killed their equipment trying to keep up, from what they said, but I wondered if maybe the storm might have been related.  Restaurant after another I tried to get food, to no avail. The thing I noticed the most though, was how fragile and explosive people were acting.  So post-apocalyptic!  For just a power outage!  Then, my real fear rose.  What if the embedded switches DO fail on January 1st, 2000.  What if the grid does go down.  In 1999 the internet was basically in its "toddler" stage and information was bad.  More so, the programs coming in from the shortwave radio underworld in which I had been a part of since the 1970s, was warning everyone, "Get out of the cities, get out of the cities, get out of the cities."

I am not going to be unprepared so I started sale buying just a little extra here and there.  One of the sales that kept reoccurring in 1999 at the local Market Basket was Beechnut Coffee for a mere 99 cents a pound.  I thought this would make a great doomsday coffee!  Besides, say it with me..."I've had worse." Or so I thought.

My friend Nick and I had shared many days in years past trying different coffee, all of it was finer and absolutely not Beechnut.  He was amused by this collection of doomsday coffee and wrote a wonderful list of alternate things you can do with Beechnut Coffee.  The most memorable suggestion was: "Your kitty likes it too!"

Of course, we all survived Y2K and lots of people got rich, me not being one of them.  I did try the "coffee" if you could call it that.  I can certainly say that Jack's Camel Dung Nescafe Instant in Saudi Arabia was much better than this.  So, it sat around for a while.  In mid-2001, my not-yet wife Donna was house-sitting for some friends of ours.  We were talking on the phone and she suddenly sort of choked and said, "Oh, this Beechnut Coffee is terrible!"  I was elated, "Beechnut Coffee?" I asked.  "I will be over in a half-hour."

I gathered every last can of it and brought it to our friend's house and proceeded to build a pyramid of doomsday coffee on their kitchen table.  They were happy, I was happy and the most important thing, we did not waste anything, although I think the "kitty" idea could have fallen into the recycling category.

I digress...

So, it's day 3.  I have stepped up my efforts to make an excellent Aeropress cup of coffee.  I even read 2 articles that differed from each other to gain a better understanding. (Is your head singing John Mellencamp's "Check It Out"?  Mine is).  I am far from arriving at the Master Brewer status that I long for.  But I am going to get it.  I promise.  It is too important because I know: