Double-Double, Triple-Triple and the 4x4

I moved to a new office space recently. I’m out of my ‘unit’ where there was a mini-fridge and a microwave and a kettle and even a toaster (which I admit, I never used – though I like toast very much, it is, for me, an intimate food you eat when you’re half-asleep and half-dressed: it just doesn’t strike me as office fare). So, equipped only with a little kettle, I’ve started drinking my coffee black. I never really put much into it before (just a blush of cream, no sugar) but now it’s just black. And this, apparently, is very unusual. I already knew this with regard to the ‘blush of cream’ which I often find hard to describe to the drive-thru box. Once I got a coffee that was half a cup of cream & half coffee because I asked for ‘half a cream’. The ‘a’ was lost in the noise of traffic and the traffic of the drive-thru work-space. But even in person I’ve had trouble with it – some Tim Hortons workers can’t seem to bypass the ‘cream machine’ which does not seem to have a ‘half a cream’ setting. Others do just fine and I get my perfect coffee. Perplexed, I have to ask though: could anyone really drink a cup that’s half filled with cream and half coffee?

I got the partial answer to this perplexing question when I was in Waterloo last week. Those trips fill me with some sense of dread. It’s not the drive which is tame exhilaration at a number of levels. It’s not seeing my mother - I look forward to that quite tenderly. It’s the town itself. My poor senses are little acclimatized to the affluent suburbs. I don’t know where I am there. I go to the mall sometimes. I see people driving Jaguars and shopping at Zellers. I go to the park skirted by monster-home-courts curved to follow the river. I go to a restaurant or more accurately, I go to a chain that serves food. Last week, I went to Williams Coffee Pub intending to read D&G. Instead I eavesdropped on a job interview, a business meeting, wrote a proposal and worked to avoid the pointed stares of an affluent middle-aged-looking-to-have-an-affair-man. I did talk to the woman working at the counter. She struck me as old-school Waterloo and when I asked for my ‘half a cream’, she openly expressed her own perplexity. “How am I going to do that”? , she said looking at the cream machine. She experimented giving me a small cream from the cream machine in a large coffee mug. She placed the coffee cup between us on the counter and we examined it together. “How’s that?” I was pleased. It looked just right. And then she asked me if I always drink it that way. She said, “I couldn’t do that. I have to put lots of cream and sugar in. I don’t really like coffee very much”.

Why didn’t I read D&G that day? Indeed, when given the rare opportunity to read, why do I ever choose not to read? Is it that I don’t really like reading very much, that I always have to put lots of cream and sugar in? I don’t think so. I think it’s more to do with intimacy – maybe reading like eating toast is something you do half-asleep and half-dressed. Yet I am a public reader and I watched people read The Outsider by Albert Camus, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, In the Twilight of Western Thought by Herman Dooyeweerd, I Hate You, Don't Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality by Jerold J. Kriesman and Hal Straus on various buses and in restaurants this week. I am one of those restaurant readers (reading on the bus makes me feel nauseous). It just needs to look and feel and taste right - like the coffee. And the temperature matters too. Definitely not lukewarm.