My Morning Muse

It didn’t start out as a deliberate act; many of these things don’t. There was no planning, no discussion. In fact, most people didn’t realize it until the event had passed. And after the first couple of days, it faded into the background with no protest, no uproar, no pleading. Perhaps the most noticeable effect was that there was no noticeable effect. Life went on.

That not always how it works out for everyone who stops drinking coffee. Most people get headaches, become irritable, or find themselves nodding off at ten in the morning. When I stopped drinking coffee over Memorial Day 2010, none of that happened. In fact, what I noticed over the next few weeks was a mellowing, a smoothing out of my day, and a quicker drift to sleep at night.

For years I’d risen with or before the dawn, pounded coffee, and slew dragons. I didn’t really start drinking coffee on a daily basis until I met Chantal. She imported this excellent coffee from Louisiana called Community Coffee. It was rich and sharp and she drank it black and it made me forget the large regular with two sugars (“lahhge regulah with two sugahs) that I sometimes ordered at Dunkin’ Donuts. Thus began my coffee drinking career.

When we lived in France we had access to a tremendous selection of coffee, muscular, aggressive roasts of pure Arabica beans. The French drink coffee as a way to hydrate themselves. They drink it in the morning, they dunk their cigarettes in it throughout the day, and they drink it at night to fall asleep. They don’t drink it out of mugs. Rather, they drink it in short cups, perpetuating the illusion of continuous consumption. Funnily enough, Chantal and I preferred the coffee we could buy in Germany, which was less edgy. We made frequent cross-border forays for this coffee, which we drank with breakfast.

Back in the States (and a couple of years later when we moved to Canada) coffee became a tool when we had children. And by tool I mean a drug in the sense of something we say to our kids all the time: “Don’t do drugs.” With the advent of erratic sleeping patterns comes the total dependency on coffee to survive the daylight hours. I discovered the joys of iced coffee, which could be spiked with chocolate syrup, cream, coffee liqueur, or whiskey, depending on the time of the day.

When I went to work for FedEx, coffee became a piece of equipment for me. Like many of my purple-and-orange brothers and sisters, reporting to work at oh-dark-thirty for a day of driving required gasoline and coffee to keep up the 14-hour days I logged. Like all couriers, I began to orchestrate my delivery route with my need for coffee and bathrooms. While we loaded our trucks, the morning discussions among couriers revolved around toilet talk: who had the best john, and what could we do when we were “out of range.” My favorite technique was called the “mirror adjustment.” A courier would pull over to the side of the road and adjust the mirror on the passenger’s side of the truck while he secretly peed on his right front tire. Another courier pointed our that all the water bottles that littered access road to the FedEx station I worked in back in Mass were filled with urine. “It’s all the coffee we drink,” he explained. “What are we supposed to do?”

The next phase of my life required absolute devotion to coffee: innkeeping. Coffee is the lynchpin to the entire operation, the only thing guests really want in the morning. Fail as an innkeeper to provide excellent coffee for guests, and you fail at your essential task. Don’t even bother breaking eggs: the day’s battle is won or lost on that first sip of coffee. Furthermore, I lived ten minutes away from Green Mountain Coffee Roasters--and later, with FedEx, I worked at the GMCR facility in Waterbury, Vermont. I found myself awash in coffee. During the workday, access to coffee was unlimited, and the latest rage were K-cups, which made delivering coffee to my system more convenient than ever.

So when I quit coffee last year, it was a major event that I somehow managed to slip quietly under the notice of most people (except for my perceptive friend Lloyd, a professional coffee drinker, who rightfully chided me for my deception). But I experienced no side-effects, no withdrawal from the bean. A sort of mellowness descended around me, a tolerance, an openness. The feeling was not unpleasant, and through the winter ski season I didn’t miss coffee.

But there was one side-effect that I did experience, one aspect of my life that suffered from my decaffeination: my writing. Coffee has always been part of my writing ritual, the routine that fuels my creativity, the morning muse for my morning pages. As an early riser, I depended on coffee to ignite my writing and elevate my consciousness. It sharpened me early and sustained me late. And I’d noticed a frustration surrounding the completion of a novel I’ve been working on for too long. So quietly, at the last Roundtable Writers’ Confab, I began sipping some coffee. And just as there was no marked difference when I stopped drinking coffee, there was nothing to signal that I’ve resumed drinking it. Oh, maybe I’ve felt a little rush in the morning following my one cup. But I think the most noticeable effect has been on my writing. More of it’s getting done, earlier, and with more clarity.

Every writer has his muse. For middle-aged guys like me it’s usually some gal in her 20s. But my muse is coffee, that robust elixir of stimulation who clears to fog from my mind and tingles my fingertips across the keyboard. It’s good to be back.