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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

RIP, Favorite Coffee Mug

Here is my morning ritual: wake up, shuffle to kitchen, pour coffee, sit down in armchair, start blogging while drinking coffee. Almost every morning I do this. Almost every morning I have done this for quite some time. The routine pretty much never varies: three big cups of coffee each day, no more, no less. […]

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Here is my morning ritual: wake up, shuffle to kitchen, pour coffee, sit down in armchair, start blogging while drinking coffee. Almost every morning I do this. Almost every morning I have done this for quite some time. The routine pretty much never varies: three big cups of coffee each day, no more, no less. Two Splendas and a splash of half-and-half, except during Lent, when I drink it black. The cosmos may continue doing that cosmic thing it does if people cease to propitiate the gods with sacrifices or fertility rites, but if I quit having my morning coffee, things really might fly apart.

This morning, I sat in my armchair in the predawn darkness and started the morning cycle. What I hadn’t noticed was that one of the kids sat in the armchair the night before, and moved it forward a few inches. Thus, when I sat my coffee mug down on the dark side table, the edge of the table was about four inches behind where I thought it was. The coffee mug had nothing below it when I let go. It hit the floor, spilling coffee everywhere, and breaking the handle off the mug.

I’m more upset about this than I should be, and not just because that mug was made for me by my son Lucas for Father’s Day 2009. I’m upset about it because it, and its twin that my other son made for me the same year, was my favorite of all my coffee mugs. Of all the mugs to choose from in the cabinet, if either of those twins was on the shelf, I would have picked one of them. I have downed gallons of coffee from that mug, which held just the right amount of coffee — not too much, and not too little — and was exactly the right heft. It was like putting on the perfect coat, or sitting in a chair perfectly contoured to your body. I get weird about little things like that. In my closet, I have certain articles of clothing that most people would have given up on ages ago. I finally had to relinquish an ancient L.L. Bean woolen sweater because it was literally in tatters, and my wife wouldn’t let me wear it in front of people, lest they think I was a beggar. When I find something that feels right — a certain sweater, a particular pair of jeans, an ideal coffee mug — I bond with it. I have plenty of other mugs that will deliver coffee to my lips in a satisfactory manner. But I have one less perfect mug. It’s just a piece of ceramic, but I feel that I’m saying goodbye to an old friend.

Is that strange? Sure, I guess. But little things like this make me realize how much the mundanity of our lives can take on what you might call a liturgical sense. That is, a familiar way or pattern of doing things can come to seem like a formula for establishing a connection to the sacred. Mind you, there is nothing actually sacred about drinking morning coffee. But me, I love coffee — I really love coffee — and there’s almost no better time of day than the quiet minutes when everyone else is asleep, and I’m rising to meet the day, and seeing what happened overnight. What news is there? Who wrote to me? What will I talk about to my readers today? This time is sacred to me, because what I do is look out across the world and write about it. The absent-minded ritual of lifting the cup to my mouth, drinking in the morning, and setting my day off right, has become important to me in a way I hadn’t fully appreciated until this morning, when somebody moved something just a bit, and I discovered by the breaking of my favorite mug that things weren’t where they were supposed to be. Now the rite is undone, or at least cannot be performed perfectly.

I know, I know. It’s a coffee cup, nothing more. I’m not crying over spilled coffee, or a broken ceramic coffee mug. By this time next week, I will have forgotten about it, most likely. Still, I didn’t know how much this minor thing meant to me until it was suddenly gone. I wish I had been more careful with it. Strange, isn’t it, how important a little thing like that can become in one’s imagination. I mean, if I had crashed my car, I would have been supremely annoyed that I would have to pay the money and go through the trouble to fix the damn thing. The car is a mere tool — an expensive one, but a replaceable one. But the demise of this basically worthless, but one-of-a-kind coffee cup, gets to me.

All of which is to say: don’t mess with the liturgy. That is all.

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