Coffee with Cream, Hold the Drama
Not to make too much of it, but now that the dust has cleared and I am firmly ensconced in 40, I see I've actually stumbled over the border to The Drama-Free Zone. Behind me, the accumulated gore of 40 years, like some WWI painting from Otto Dix...
... but up ahead it's all Hiroshi Sugimoto, baby...
Still, it's hard to shake all that gore off your boots even on the other side of drama. And then there are always a few drama queens clinging to your ankles trying to pull you back into the fray. I feel kind of dazzled by my new dissociative mood; I'm not budging, bitches.
I happened to arrive at my new mood in autumn. Every autumn I say it, but it always bears repeating: there's such a thing as autumn for a reason. It's really the best of all the seasons — Winter is a cruel prison warden. Spring is panting from its desperate escape from its interminable captivity. Summer runs itself ragged. Autumn's when you breathe. What's done is done and cannot be undone. You make your peace.
Fall at the Orphanage, however, is not really a peaceful time. Life picks up in the fall, when everyone moves indoors and carves out their territory around the raging hearth of the Mittens Memorial Great Room. Mittens, who predates my residency at Seven Hills, is buried out back in the Solitude and Meditation corner of the Mittens Memorial Garden, in a stand of catnip with a concrete bird-bath for a headstone.
Back in Mittens' day, the Orphanage was known as Madam Chen's Molly House, which was, as the name suggests, a racier place to call home. There have been a lot of changes in the old neighborhood over the years, but one survivor — Madam Chen herself, from Molly House days — remains, shuffling the halls like a ghost, consorting with other ghosts she has known, dear old Mittens presumably among them.
I've got nothing but respect for Madam Chen, you understand. In fact, I sympathize. In the transition from Molly House to Orphanage — a subtle, by-degrees transition, granted, but one we all will make if we live long enough — she suddenly finds herself a queen without a country.
What to do?
Well, if you're a queen you make your own damn country, don't you? It can be 300 miles square or 300 feet. It helps if you have a Biedermeier Wardrobe, a royal tern or two, and a tiara, but that's not really what makes a queen. Subjects make a queen. Willing or unwilling. Hell, even subjects who don't know they're subjects will do. So long as there's intrigue in the offing they'll find out soon enough.
It's mostly harmless mischief, of course. But occasionally you hit a nerve, as the other morning when I came down to make my daily pot of coffee, and there was no coffee pot. Which was hard to comprehend without a cup of coffee first. I was frozen for a good twenty minutes in this catch-22, at an utter loss as to what to do with myself.
I managed somehow to pull it together long enough to scare up some stale espresso grounds for my Bialetti. Once I'd had a triple shot, I was able to formulate my first coherent question of the day: WTF?
But I knew to my gurgling core it was Chen. Up to her old tricks.
At least twenty-four hours went by without any word on the purloined coffee pot. There were murmurs in the house. Evidence of the missing carafe showed up in the glass recyclables bin on the curbside on recycling day. Finally, feigning the flakiness that she inconceivably thinks endears her to us all, Madam Chen let out that she had indeed broken the carafe, but had been far too frazzled to report it so that the house could avert a real coffee catastrophe.
Too late. It went on and on. Finally Madam Chen announced she would seek a match for the old carafe — from a decrepit Mister Coffee circa 1968 — on freecycle.
I want to be very clear. I am a fan of freecycle. It's great for adding machine paper, electric typewriters, and heated dog beds. But this is my morning cup of coffee at stake here. And I need it now.
How do you handle a situation like this in the Drama-Free Zone? You go out and get your own damn coffeemaker, listen politely as you're lectured that the reusable filter will leach Bisphenol-A into your coffee, and that the purchase of a new machine only adds to your carbon footprint, then brew a pot of piping hot coffee, walk out to the front stoop and admire the view.
Because it's all Hiroshi Sugimoto from here on out, baby...
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